The Auerbach Will

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  Essie stiffens slightly in her chair. The new drink, somehow, is not having its desired effect. She stares at Joan.

  Daisy now stands up quickly, gathering her fur scarves around her. “I really think I must go,” she says. “I’m sorry—”

  “No, stay,” Essie says softly. “Joan, please tell us what you’re talking about.”

  “I’m saying that I don’t think our Papa was Josh’s father, and I’m saying that I think I know who Josh’s father is.”

  Essie closes her eyes. “Say what you have to say, Joan,” she says.

  “It was Uncle Abe, wasn’t it? It was an incestuous rape, wasn’t it? Josh’s father was your own brother.”

  Suddenly Essie has a fit of giggles, which threatens to expand into a fit of hiccups. Tears stream from her eyes and, through her laughter, she gasps, “Oh … oh … oh, Joan … you silly woman! Abe … rape … oh, my goodness me … oh, my Lord in Kansas.… Somebody get me a glass of water.…”

  “All right, Mogie,” Joan says. “Tell them what you know.”

  Mogie opens his eyes wide. “What I know, Joan?”

  “Yes. About incest, rape—Mendel—Uncle Abe.”

  “What in the world are you talking about?” Mogie asks.

  Joan’s fingers fly to her lips. “This was all your idea, Mogie! You said it! That day at the Pierre …”

  “Really, Joan, what a preposterous suggestion. I never said anything like that.”

  “How they looked alike, how they both—”

  “It’s not all that uncommon for someone to look like his uncle, Joan. But I certainly never implied—”

  “Mogie, you lying little fart! You know you did! At the Pierre!”

  “I haven’t been at the Pierre in ages,” Mogie says. “Joan, I think you’re hallucinating. Obviously your recent bad luck has unhinged you. Yes, I think Mother’s right. Your affairs should be placed in someone else’s hands. Mother, I apologize for what I said.”

  “Mogie, you shit!” She starts toward him, hands outstretched as though to tear him apart. Christina rushes between them, and there is a brief scuffle between the two women, and the room seems to fill with cries and shouts.

  “Quite crazy,” Mogie says over the confusion. “Shall we call the hotel doctor?” He moves toward the telephone.

  Suddenly Joan stands still. She turns to Essie. “Then why was Uncle Abe being paid off all these years, Mother?” she asks.

  Essie blinks, and the giggles and hiccups stop simultaneously. “What?” she says.

  “You heard me. Why the payoff?”

  “How do you know about that?”

  “And that’s not all I know, Mother. Ten thousand dollars a month. Not exactly chicken feed. Checks to Arthur Litton—Uncle Abe—a known criminal. Going back to nineteen twenty-eight, the year that Josh was born. Coincidence? Not bloody likely, Mother.”

  “Get Mary Farrell for me,” Essie whispers.

  “Never mind her. Just tell us what that was for, Mother. If it wasn’t to keep him quiet—then what?”

  “I don’t feel well.…”

  “Just tell us the truth, Mother.”

  “It was—it was a private matter between Abe and me. It had nothing to do with Josh. It was—to protect, or so I thought, you children, all of us, from some—unpleasantness. Sometimes I wonder if it was worth it. That’s all it was. It had nothing to do with Josh, or any of my children.”

  “Then who was Josh’s father?” Joan demands.

  Josh, who has said nothing during any of this, but has simply kept his steady, half-amused gaze on all of them, crosses his long legs, sits back in his armchair, steeples his fingers and says in an even voice, “Lay off it, Joan. You’re making a horse’s ass of yourself. I’ll tell you who my father is, if you want to know.”

  “Who?”

  Slowly, Josh turns his head toward Charles and smiles and Charles, in turn, lowers his eyes, then raises them to meet Josh’s, and he returns the smile. Somehow, some filial gesture seems demanded now—an embrace, a kiss, even a handshake might be called for, but no such dramatic element is supplied, just the exchange of little smiles. The silence at last is broken by a woman’s loud sobbing. It is Christina, and suddenly Essie’s heart goes out to this forlorn, confused, benighted child.

  “Is it true, Mother?” Joan asks.

  “How long have you known, Josh?” Essie asks him.

  “Sometimes it seems as though I’ve always known it. A feeling—since I was a little kid, that Uncle Charles was more of a father to me than my own father. Then, a while back, some anonymous friend”—his eyes travel briefly to Mogie—“and I’m pretty sure I know who that anonymous friend was—sent me a silly poem in the mail. With it were two photographs—an old one of Charles, and a more recent one of me. Then I was sure. And it made me feel—”

  “Yes, Joshua,” Essie says urgently. “Tell me how it made you feel.”

  He spread his hands. “It made me feel—happy. Pleased with myself. Special. And pleased for you, Mother, and proud of your spunk. And proud to have two parents who loved each other, which the others didn’t have. I guess that sums it up. It made me feel happy and proud. So,” he says, “now that we’ve had what seems to be our annual Christmas family row, I suggest that we all go back to our rooms and get some rest before the dedication tomorrow.”

  “Just a minute!” Joan cries. “If Josh isn’t Papa’s son, there’s no legal reason in the world why he’s entitled to a penny of Papa’s money. Mogie, we can break the trust! Get me Roy Cohn on the phone right now!”

  “Now just you wait a minute, Missy,” Essie says sharply, feeling the strength which had felt so completely sapped out of her moments ago come surging back. “Before you go calling your Mr. Cohn, you might consider another little matter which has a bearing on this situation. There happens to be a woman named Jennifer Thorpe who lives in Columbus, Ohio, who also might like to know that she is entitled to a share of Jacob Auerbach’s estate. Jennifer Thorpe has two children, and at least one grandchild. That’s four more people by my count. If you try to cut Josh out of his trust, you can very easily find yourself with four more heirs you hadn’t reckoned on—all with perfectly legal claims on your father’s estate. Am I right, Daisy?”

  Daisy sighs. “You know I came here with certain misgivings,” she says. “My position in this family has always been a little—peculiar. I’m a part of it, and yet not a part. But I came for Essie’s sake, because she asked me to come.…”

  “Continue, please,” Essie says.

  “Well, you all know I was Jake’s mistress,” she says. “I’ve always hated that word, but there doesn’t seem to be any other. He didn’t want me to have the child, and was very angry with me for disobeying him. But I did, and it’s true, as Essie says, that Jenny is Jakes daughter. My parents raised her. She was raised as Jenny Jackson—my little conceit. She never suspected she was illegitimate. I told everyone that my husband, her father, had been killed in a car crash before she was born. But Jake’s name is on the birth certificate—I had to put someone’s name as the father. Of course I’ve never told Jenny who her father was. And, in fact, Jenny now has four grandchildren, not just one.”

  “So, so I now count seven more heirs with claims for shares of Jake Auerbach’s estate,” Essie says. “Seven—is my arithmetic correct? Seven people—all perfectly entitled to sue for whatever they think they can get. Oh, won’t that be fun, Joan? Just think what fun the newspapers will have with all of you when this can of worms get opened up. Think what fun your Mr. Roy Cohn will have with this—and all the lawyers. Why, I wouldn’t be surprised if it cost you all so much in legal fees before you’re finished that there wouldn’t be a red cent left for any of you! And that, come to think of it, might not be such a bad idea!”

  Joan turns to Daisy. “Would you ever do such a thing, Daisy?” she asks.

  Daisy shifts in her chair. “I admit it would be difficult,” she says carefully. “It would be painful—to drag the skeleton
out of the closet after all these years—for Jenny, for her children, her grandchildren.…”

  “You see? I knew it. You wouldn’t dare!”

  “Now, wait a minute, Joan,” Daisy says. “I didn’t say I wouldn’t dare. I would dare. I would indeed dare.”

  “You wouldn’t dare let all these—horrors come out!”

  “Oh, yes I would,” Daisy says. “If Essie asked me to—yes, I would.”

  In the little silence that follows, Joan turns sharply away from her.

  “You always were a conniving bitch, weren’t you, Daisy,” Mogie says.

  Daisy’s eyes travel to him. “Mogie, I pity you,” she says.

  Now Essie reaches for the cane beside her chair and slowly rises to her feet. With the assistance of the cane, she tries to reach her full stature, and she is suddenly proud to remember that she had her hair done that morning in New York, that she is wearing the green hostess gown by Charles James which the Metropolitan Museum has asked to have for its costume collection, and that she is wearing her emeralds which, of course, are very fine. “Now,” she says, “Joan, you can tell the waiters to come out and clean up. My party’s over. There isn’t going to be any more bloodshed. You can all go.” She turns to Josh. “Joshua,” she says, “Charles and I are having our dinner sent up. Would you like to join us?”

  He stands up. “Well, I think I’ve had just about all the emotion I can take for one evening,” he says. “I’m going to turn in. But thank you, anyway.” He moves quickly toward her, takes her elbows, and kisses her on both cheeks. “Good night, Mother. See you tomorrow.”

  Essie turns to Daisy with a little sigh. “Thank you, my dear.”

  Later, when they are alone together, Charles says to her, “Good job, old girl. I was rooting for you all the way. But I didn’t need to.”

  “Charles, can I make it through another day?”

  The huge white Travertine lobby of the new Eaton Tower has been turned into an auditorium of sorts, and some fifteen hundred chairs have been set up to accommodate the guests at the dedication ceremony—many of whom are dignitaries, but many of whom are ordinary, curious citizens come to witness the unofficial unveiling of the tallest building in the world, excited by the fact that it is in Chicago, not New York, that in sheer height it outstrips the World Trade Center, the Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building. It also may be, Essie thinks, the ugliest building in the world. At least all this whiteness, starkness, massiveness is not to her taste. The lobby itself is unrelieved by any touch of color, though Josh has told her that eventually there will be paintings on the walls, potted trees and flowers, more sculpture. She has paused, on her way in, to pay her respects to the bronze bust of her late husband, larger than life, which has been placed between the two main banks of elevators addressing a tall wall of sheer glass and a large, parklike plaza just beyond. The speakers’ table, draped in white linen, is flanked by many large poinsettia plants in tubs wrapped in green foil, and is surmounted by a large formal flower arrangement of red anthuriums and green leaves—Christmas colors.

  “Ekiel Matoff,” she says to the elderly gentleman seated on her right, “do you remember me?”

  He leans toward her lips, cupping his left ear with one hand, and she realizes that he is hard of hearing.

  “Do you remember me?”

  “I knew your late husband well,” he says. “Fine man. And Eaton’s always paid its bills. More than I can say with some retailers I’ve dealt with in my time.”

  “If you don’t remember me, don’t tell me. I don’t want to know.”

  “Yes, fine day for this. Snow’s held off. Quite a turnout.”

  Now Josh is speaking, and she hears his amplified words echoing throughout the marble lobby. “This building was not intended as a memorial to Jacob Auerbach,” he is saying. “Nor was it intended as a piece of corporate puffery, nor as a kind of symbol to please our many thousands of stockholders. In fact, if this building is to be a symbol of anything, I would like to believe that it is a symbol of the dedication and devotion of the hundreds of thousands of loyal employees of Eaton and Cromwell who have served us over the years.…”

  Loyal employees, Essie thinks, who were paid as little as five dollars a week, not even enough for carfare, so little that it was said that the assembly-line girls had to turn to prostitution to make ends meet.

  “Our profit-sharing plan, revolutionary at the time …”

  But what caused that revolution, Jake? Fear of more bad press. Fear of bad public relations.

  “Jacob Auerbach’s vision …”

  But was it Jake’s vision? Or was it Charles’s? Or was it perhaps her own in some way? Of course it was.

  “If Jacob Auerbach were here today, I know he would not only be personally proud of this new building, but would also want to say a personal word of thanks to each and every Eaton employee, from the lowliest mailroom clerk to our present Board Chairman, here on my right, Charles Wilmont.…”

  But would he? I doubt it, Essie thinks. But how can she honestly fault Josh for what he is saying? It is only business rhetoric, the business rhetoric all these people have come to hear. He is, au fond, a businessman, not a poet or a rabbi. They were all businessmen—her blacksmith grandfather in Russia, her mother, Jake’s mother and his uncles, Jake himself, and now her son. One cannot quarrel with what is in one’s genes, and she did not marry a rabbi or a rabbi’s son.

  “Envisioning the rapid growth of suburban shopping malls …

  “The dramatic decision to move from strictly mail-order to a chain of retail outlets …

  “But of course Jacob Auerbach cannot be with us today to share our pride and our gratitude to one and all … but I am especially happy to present to you today the woman who shared his life for fifty-eight years, his widow, my mother, Esther Auerbach.”

  Was it fifty-eight years? Yes, Josh is right, it was. Think of it! Then she suddenly realizes that she has just been introduced, that she is expected to do something, that it is her turn to speak, that Josh is smiling and beckoning to her from the speaker’s lectern, that there is applause, that she is expected to rise now. Had Josh warned her that it would be like this—so sudden? She reaches for her cane, but it slides from her grasp and falls to the floor. Deftly, on her left, Charles reaches down for it, retrieves it, and places it firmly in her left hand. In the same gesture, he squeezes her hand and whispers, “Good luck.”

  Slowly, Essie rises, using both the cane and Ekiel Matoff’s shoulder for support, and makes her way with some difficulty—the passageway behind the chairs across the platform is rather narrow—to the lectern, and the microphone that rises from among the anthuriums. She grips the edge of the lectern, and, leaning into the microphone, says, “This is only temporary,” and holds up the cane.

  There is a ripple of polite laughter from the audience, but what astonishes Essie the most is the sound of her own voice coming booming and echoing back to her from every side of the big room. They have not warned her about that, either!

  She knows now, too, that every word of her carefully memorized and rehearsed speech has flown out of her head completely. On the lectern, squarely in front of her, where they had promised it would be, sits Mary’s neatly triple-spaced typing, but the floodlights—they have not warned her about the floodlights—are shining so brightly in her eyes that she cannot see the words. The sheet of paper is a white, blinding blank. Essie has often addressed meetings of the Opera Guild, where there were lights and a microphone, but there were never such angry, glaring lights as these, and there were never these thundering echoes from walls of bare marble and glass. She turns the sheet of paper this way and that, but the words refuse to come into focus. Still, she must say something. Clearing her throat she begins, “My husband was not Jake Auerbach.…”

  There is a titter or two, and some coughing, from the audience.

  “No, that’s not right,” she says. In the audience, now, she searches for Mary Farrell’s face, or for Daisy’s,
or for any face that will seem familiar or reassuring, but she can find no one. In the distance, coming from somewhere—the street perhaps—she can hear the faint sounds of Christmas caroling, voices singing, “O little town …”

  “O little town,” she repeats into the microphone. “When I first came to Chicago, in nineteen-o-seven, it was a little town.…” On her right side, she feels Charles reach out and touch her arm and, on her left, she feels Josh’s hand. “My husband and I watched it grow. And now we have this big building.… Oh, dear,” she says. “I had what I was going to say all memorized. When I was a girl, I was good at memorizing.” From the audience, there is more coughing.

  “Talmud,” she hears Josh whisper to her.

  “Talmud,” she repeats, and the word “Talmud!” comes pounding back at her from the walls and ceiling. Perhaps, she thinks, if I speak more quickly, I can get the words out like lightning before the thunder, and so she begins again, “But it wasn’t the Talmud, it was this: Der shtrom fun menshenz maysim bayt zikh imer—nemstu dem rikhtigen, firt er tsu glik; hostu farzen—der ganster veg fun leben vet zikh durkh umglik un durkh flakhkeyt shlepen.…”

  There are whispers, now, and rustlings of programs, and the sounds of people shifting uncomfortably in their seats.

  “But that’s not the Talmud. That’s Mr. Shakespeare—‘There is a tide in the affairs of men, / Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; / Omitted, all the voyage of their life / Is bound in shallows and in miseries.’ But my point is that my husband, who was Jacob Auerbach, became a very rich man—the tide taken at the flood. But the Talmud says that a poor man is more blessed than a rich man. And so I say—look around you—who is more miserable—the rich man or the poor? Those who expect the most often receive the least, and those who expect the least often receive the most. That’s from the Talmud, too. My father taught me that, and what are the lessons we remember longest? Aren’t they the ones we learned when we were young and new?