The Wrong Kind of Money

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  “You were very quiet at dinner tonight,” Hannah said.

  “Was I? I’m sorry.”

  In fact, Hannah had noticed a change come over Bathy in recent weeks. She had become more quiet and withdrawn, not her usual bright and cheerful self. Hannah already had an inkling of what it might be, but she had waited for a moment to be alone with Bathy, like right now, and for Bathy to tell her what it was. “Is something on your mind, dear?” she asked her at last.

  “Yes, there is,” Bathy said. “Yes, I’m afraid there very much is.”

  “Something’s troubling you.”

  “Yes. Oh, yes.” She turned away from her. “Oh, Hannah, the most awful thing has happened!”

  “Can you tell me what it is?”

  “I don’t even know how it happened. I don’t think I wanted it to happen. It just—happened! It happened in Toronto, last month, when Jules and I went up to interview the new Canadian ad agency. We were celebrating the new contract, and we—”

  “I see,” Hannah said quietly. “I see. You made love.”

  “Will you ever forgive me, Hannah? He made me swear I’d never tell you, Hannah, but I had to tell you. I couldn’t go on living here like this, knowing what I’d done to my own big sister, without—”

  “Let’s make one thing quite clear,” Hannah said. “I’m never going to tell him that you told me, and you’re never going to tell him that you told me, either. Let’s make that solemn promise to each other right here and now.”

  “But what am I going to do? I mean, I love working for Ingraham and I—”

  “What are you going to do? Nothing.”

  “But I can’t stay here like this, Hannah, after what’s happened. If Settie were still alive, I’d go to her, but—”

  “Nonsense. I promised Mama on her deathbed that I’d always take care of you, and I always will. You belong right here with Jules and me.”

  “You mean—”

  “This is not the end of the world, Bathy. Things like this have happened before in families. And they’ll happen again, as long as there are men and women. But I’m not going to let you throw your life away, and your brilliant career, over what happened one night in Toronto.”

  “But, you see—it was—it’s—oh, it’s such a mess!”

  “I see,” Hannah said again. “I think you’re trying to tell me you’re in love with him.”

  “Yes. That’s the worst part. I think I am.”

  “If you think you are, you are. Is he in love with you?”

  She shook her head. “No,” she said miserably. “I don’t think Jules is in love with anybody, except—”

  “Except himself? Don’t say that. Jules is a very complicated man, with powerful needs. He needs love.”

  “I was going to say except his company. And you. If he didn’t care for you, why would he make me promise never to tell you about this affair we’ve been having? If he didn’t care for you, he’d offer to divorce you and marry me. But he’ll never do that!”

  “No, I suppose not.”

  “Because he cares so God damn much about what the God damn public thinks of the great Jules Liebling!”

  “Now, Bathy, don’t say that about him, either. I think it’s more likely that he loves us both, but in different ways. I think that’s possible, don’t you? He needs us both.”

  “How? How does he need me?”

  “I’ll tell you how. He needs you because you’re like the son he’s always wanted, the son who’d take an interest in the business, ever since Cyril turned out to be a—disappointment to him. He needs you because you’re brilliant at what you do. And now I think he also needs you for—the other thing.”

  “What other thing?”

  “The physical side of marriage, as Mama used to call it. I’m afraid I’ve never been very good at that, with Jules. He still wants another son, and I’ve been trying to give him one. But it hasn’t worked, and I think it’s because he knows my heart isn’t in it. But it’s hard to pretend that one enjoys that sort of thing when—well, when one just doesn’t.”

  Bathy looked at her. “Did you ever enjoy sex with Jules, Hannah?” she asked her.

  “No, looking back, I suppose I really didn’t.”

  “Ever? With any man?”

  “Oh, yes. Long ago there was someone.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “He was—inappropriate, or so Papa said. I don’t want to talk about him, Bathy. It was a very unhappy time for me.”

  “And so you married Jules.”

  “He was the bird in the hand, as Mama put it. He was attractive. And very rich. And I didn’t want to be a spinster. And he wanted to marry Marcus Sachs’s daughter.”

  “For his precious respectability, I suppose!”

  “That’s what the family said at the time. But don’t be too hard on him, Bathy. I think he also loved me. He’s been a good husband!”

  “You can say that even after your sister has just told you she’s been sleeping with him?”

  “Yes, I can say that. Jules is a good man, Bathy.”

  “But the sexual attraction was never there.”

  “Not really. I tried, though. I’m still trying, though it gets harder as the years go by. Sometimes I think that sort of attraction only happens once to a woman.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “And now it’s happened to you.”

  She nodded. “I’d be lying if I said it hadn’t,” she said.

  “And for the first time?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “A woman never forgets that first time, you know. It lives with her for the rest of her life.”

  “That wouldn’t surprise me, Hannah.”

  There was a flicker of heat lightning in the sky, and the words floated into Hannah’s mind: Bathy, perhaps there’s something I ought to tell you now.… But she kept the words buried there, unspoken. Instead she said, “Bathy, this could be good for us both. For your career and—”

  Bathy turned to her almost angrily. “Are you trying to say that I did this to try to build a fire under my career? Went to bed with the boss to try to get a promotion? Like a Joan Crawford movie? I’m not that stupid, Hannah. I know how to advance my career without that! I didn’t set out to seduce him. And he didn’t set out to seduce me. It just—happened.”

  “I know, I know,” Hannah said soothingly. “I know how these things happen. They happen. I just meant that this is another reason why he needs you. You can satisfy him in that way. He needs us both. Perhaps we should both consider ourselves lucky. Perhaps this was inevitable.”

  “Lucky? Inevitable? Oh, Hannah, what strange words you use to describe this mess we’re both in!”

  “Why not? Where’s the mess? Show me a mess. I don’t see a mess. I see a solution to a lot of problems. Of course you’re lucky. Jules is still a very attractive man. He needs you. You’re seventeen years younger than I am. You’re beautiful. You love him. I’m—well, I’m not so young, not so beautiful anymore, and child-bearing has certainly taken its toll on what was considered my best point, my figure. You can make him happier, and if he’s happier, I’ll be happier. We’ll all be happier, as a family. Perhaps this is the best thing that could have happened to us, Bathy.”

  “You’re saying we could—share him?”

  “Why not? We’ve always been—well, closer than most sisters. Somehow, to me, this makes you seem even closer.”

  Bathy shivered. “I’m not sure I’m going to be able to do this, Hannah.”

  “Of course you can. You’re a Sachs. Sachses take care of one another. Sachses can do anything. Sachses are geniuses. Descended from rabbis and scholars since the sixteenth century. Royal blood. Sachses are tough. We’re not put together with flour-and-water paste.”

  “It won’t be easy, Hannah.”

  “Mama used to say, ‘Anything worth doing is worth working hard to do,’ and Mama was only a Sachs by marriage, but it rubbed off. We’ll both work, and we’ll both work hard.”
r />   “How do we—begin?”

  “Begin? We begin right now.” She reached for her basket and her pruning shears, and rose to her feet. “Let’s go find him. He’s probably in the library now, having a brandy and a cigar, and probably feeling miserable with guilt—as miserable as you were when I found you sitting here. Let’s make him happy, Bathy. I’ll play the piano, and you can sing. He loves to hear you sing. Let’s fuss over him the way he loves to be fussed over.” She reached out and took Bathy’s hand, but Bathy held back.

  “But won’t we both be just becoming—more of Jules’s possessions?” she asked. “Like Mozart manuscripts?”

  Hannah laughed. “We are already,” she said. “And we’re all in safekeeping here at Grandmont.” She pulled the reluctant Bathy to her feet, and the two women started up the garden path together toward the lighted house. “We’ll say we’ve been out strolling in the garden, looking at the heat lightning.” She took Bathy’s arm. “We’ll act as though nothing at all has changed,” she said.

  “Even though everything has,” Bathy said. “Even though nothing will ever be the same.”

  Suddenly Hannah stopped, gripping Bathy’s arm. “I think perhaps there’s something that I ought to tell you now,” she said.

  “What is it, Hannah?”

  “No. Never mind. It’s nothing,” she said. They continued toward the house.

  And later the sounds of singing and laughter could be heard from the open windows across the warm spring night, while in the moonlight the huge moon-white blooms of the Hannah Sachs Liebling dahlias nodded in the breeze.

  If it hadn’t been for that arrangement with Bathy, Hannah thinks now, where would I be today? Who knows? But certainly not in an apartment at 1000 Park Avenue, with a voting majority of Ingraham’s stock. What wisdom I had then! she thinks. What tolerance. What understanding. What forbearance. What sophistication, to propose an arrangement that was so mature, so intelligent, so practical, so—European! A ménage à trois that operated perfectly (well, almost perfectly) for the next thirty years. How proud Mama would have been of me—Mama, who loved intrigue, deceptions, secrets, plots. Of course, this is all baloney, she knows that now. She acted to save her own skin, in order to have her cake and eat it, too.

  Why do you deceive yourself, lady? Why do you try to lay at the feet of others the responsibility for what you yourself did? Admit it now. You used Bathy, deliberately and heartlessly, to suit your own selfish purposes. You simply went about setting up Bathy as your surrogate, your stand-in to do the dirty work you were too cowardly to admit you didn’t want to do yourself. You hired a stunt girl to do the scenes that would have been too rough on the star. You assigned Bathy to take your falls for you. When you began to be afraid that your husband would sense your indifference to his needs, and would take a mistress anyway, you decided that Bathy was the best choice for the job. She was the in-house choice, the choice you could control because she was already on the payroll. Pretty nasty thing to do, wasn’t it, grooming Bathy to be your husband’s lover? But that’s what you did, old girl, old girl. And you did it step by calculated step. Inevitable? That was not exactly the precise word. Orchestrated would be a better one. And the word for you? Procuress.

  You were the one who planned the sleeping arrangements at Grandmont: your bedroom, sitting room, dressing room, and bath at one end of the long carpeted upstairs hallway, Jules’s at the other, and Bathy’s quarters in between these two master suites. The nursery, the children’s rooms, and the servants’ quarters were all in a separate wing, approached by a separate staircase. The three adults in the house were to be free to come and go as they wished, in uninterrupted privacy, in that house and elsewhere:

  “I have a business dinner in Washington next week, Hannah. Can you come with me?”

  “Oh, Jules, you know how I dislike those things.”

  “But I need to entertain some congressmen, Hannah. I need a hostess.”

  “Then why not take Bathy? She’s so amusing and decorative, and she knows so much more about the business than I do. And the experience would be wonderful for her, meeting all those senators. She’d be much better than I’d be at persuading them not to vote for more of their damned federal excise taxes.…”

  “I have to be in San Francisco in October. Would you like to come?”

  “October? No, no, Jules dear. In October I have to supervise the planting of the spring bulbs. If I’m not around, they’ll get the colors of the tulips all wrong. But take Bathy with you. You know how much she gets out of these business trips of yours.”

  Et cetera, et cetera.

  And soon it was, “I’ve asked Bathy to come along on the Canada trip with me. I hope you don’t mind.”

  “Of course not, darling. It’s an advertising meeting. Bathy belongs there.”

  At hotels they always registered separately, in separate bedrooms, often on different floors. On trains they traveled in separate compartments. On planes Jules flew first-class, and Bathy flew economy, all in the guise of probity, respectability. You could always count on Jules to be discreet, for the slightest whiff of scandal was what he dreaded most. Still, after that evening in the garden, Hannah knew the scandal was finally there, in place and running, and only Hannah held the key to that Pandora’s box. Let Jules make one misstep, and Hannah would threaten to release all the ills of his world.

  Piously, she had tried to tell herself, tried to convince herself, that she was really doing all this out of her consideration for Jules. This was all for Jules’s happiness. He wanted, needed—so she tried to make herself believe—a younger woman’s warm and passionate body, and so—out of the boundless generosity of her heart—she had led Bathy to be sacrificed before the altar of the great Jules Liebling.

  This was all a lie, of course. It is interesting to see how far human beings can go to deceive themselves about their true motives. The truth was a little more stark. Jules’s happiness had nothing to do with it. The fact was that she would stop at nothing to keep her husband and his money, for Jules and his money provided the only toehold left in life for her. Without Jules and his money, where would she go? Without Jules and his money, who would she be? Cast adrift from Jules and his money, where would she land? She had grown far too accustomed to the things Jules and his money could buy. She had grown far too accustomed to being a rich man’s wife. As she approached middle years, that rich man’s money had become the anchor to which the ship of her life was secured. Hannah might have tried to deny that to herself then, but she admits it now. As her marriage entered its second decade, she had grown increasingly fearful of losing that golden anchor.

  Try to get rid of me, she would tell him, and I will take Bathy with me, and then where will you be? She is part of the package, part of the deal you made when you bought me.

  Try to marry Bathy, and I will spill the beans about what has been going on, and you, Mr. Respectability, will discover what a real Liebling family scandal is all about. Try to mess with me, Mr. High-and-Mighty, Mr. Probity, and the first person I’ll go to will be someone like Roxy Rhinelander, and smear your precious name all over town.

  And so, that moonlit night in the garden, Bathy’s news seemed to Hannah almost like a blessing, the answer to a prayer. Now, if she could just produce another son for Jules, the blessing would be complete. Her final obligation to her husband would be paid. The anchor of her life would be set even more securely. She could never become unmoored. With a son Jules would remain tethered to her for the rest of his life, and she would be free at last.

  That night in her dressing room, as she sat before her mirror creaming her face, preparing for bed, there was a tap on her door. “Come in!” she called out airily. It was Jules in his dressing gown, and as she looked up at his reflection in the mirror, his expression was serious, almost solemn, as though embarrassed by his mission. “Shall we try again tonight?” he said a little hoarsely. “To make another son?” “Of course, darling,” she said with a bright laugh. “Why not?�
� Outside, the heat lightning flickered palely through the drawn window hangings. Why not, indeed? With the way her luck was running, this might be one of the last times she’d have to do it.

  And yet when she remembers that night now, she recalls approaching the chore in a different spirit. This was what her mother had described as a woman’s wifely duty to her husband, her cross to bear. But that night it didn’t seem like that at all. Knowing that she now knew his and Bathy’s secret gave her a certain sense of power. She no longer felt submissive. She was in control and, wonder of wonders, she’d even felt herself beginning to enjoy it a little. Is it possible that, in the middle of it, she actually cried out, “I love you, Jules”? It is possible. Life is filled with such conundrums.

  And when Noah was born nine months later, she thought of this baby as a special gift from Bathy. Bathy owed this to her.

  Owed? Yes, owed. Bathy owed everything to her, her whole life. But did she owe Bathy nothing in return? No, nothing, except, perhaps, the truth.…

  “You must simply forget that Bathy is your daughter,” her mother had said to her. “You must simply drive it from your mind. She is your sister. It has been made official.”

  “But couldn’t I tell her—someday?”

  “Never!”

  “Why not, Mama?”

  “Because if she ever knew, she would never be able to find a decent husband. No decent man would have her. She would die a spinster, the worst thing that can happen to a woman.”

  And so she had kept her promise, and now Bathy would die a spinster anyway.

  “Just forget she’s your daughter. Drive it from your mind. It will be the easiest thing in the world to do.”

  But of course it was not the easiest thing in the world to do. It was impossible to do. There was no way she could ever drive it from her mind, no way she could simply forget it. It was there, in Hannah’s mind, indelibly imprinted, every waking moment of her days, and often in her dreams at night. At times in the past she has thought of telling Bathy in her will: “To my beloved daughter Bathsheba Sachs, I bequeath …” But that seemed too cowardly, to tell Bathy the truth from her grave. Which was worse, clinging to a painful secret or breaking a promise? It is another conundrum, all the more difficult when the secret and the promise are the same thing. And now, perhaps, it no longer matters. Too much time has gone by. Too many opportunities have been missed. It is too late. Still, Hannah reminds herself, everything you did to Bathy years ago, every way you used her, every lie you told her, she was—and is, and always will be—at the bottom of things, your daughter. Forget that. Drive that from your mind. But it’s useless even to try. Even helping Bathy and Jules become lovers didn’t help. It was supposed to help, but it didn’t.