The Golden Cup

by Belva Plain

  Dan interrupted. “It’s an evil place, Walter, no matter what you say. And worst of all, a firetrap, of which the owners must be perfectly aware.”

  “The owners are aware of nothing of the sort,” said Walter. His pupils, magnified behind the glasses, were black stones.

  The Werner cousins got up as a group. There was a general consulting of pocket watches and watches on chains around the ladies’ necks. From the outer hall sounded the flurry of departure: delightful … thanks so much … oh, my boots … started to snow, look at that … oh, it won’t be anything much, just a few flurries … delightful …

  Walter has cat’s eyes, Hennie thought, when he’s furious. I never noticed. I want to get home, get out of here. When will it end?

  The two men still faced each other.

  “Why, it’s obvious to a child, to anyone who cared to think about it! The owners don’t give a damn!”

  “You know a lot about the owners.”

  “Well, Veiller has looked it all up. They’ll be surprised to see themselves spread over the newspapers when he has made his report to the legislature. We’re not giving up. We want a new tenement act. And I’m invited to go along to Albany. Well, I did do some of the work,” Dan added, almost boyishly, “so I suppose I’m entitled to go.” In his enthusiasm, his wrath seemed to have died.

  “So you are going to Albany to make an example of the Montgomery. Have you any idea who the owners are?”

  “Oh, some sort of a group, a holding corporation. Veiller knows more about those things than I do.”

  “Oh, does he? Well, I’ll tell you. The major stockholders happen to be my father and some of his friends. We took the property back on default of a mortgage. Have you anything to say about that?”

  Walter was perspiring. He patted his forehead with a handkerchief. The room was totally silent.

  “Well,” Dan said. “Well.”

  And old Mr. Werner repeated, “Well. Yes, well.”

  “I didn’t know,” Dan said.

  Walter sighed. “I want to believe that. But it does show you what comes of meddling where you don’t belong, doesn’t it?”

  Dan shook his head. “No. I’m a citizen. I care very much what happens in my city, and I do belong.”

  “Be that as it may, what do you plan to do in this particular situation?”

  “What can I do?”

  “I think that’s pretty obvious. You can go to your people and get them to stop whatever has been started.”

  “Walter … that’s impossible. The report is already in the hands of the committee.”

  “It can be withdrawn.”

  “Veiller would never do that and I could never ask him to.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because … it would be dishonest, against the grain.”

  “Not against the grain to see the name of Werner smeared in some muckraker’s journal? You would do that?”

  Dan threw up his hands. “It would not be something I’d enjoy. You can’t think it would.”

  “I don’t know what I can or cannot think. All I know is that we have a question here of family, a family to which you happen to belong and to which you owe some loyalty. Talk about principles!”

  “Well, if you put it that way—shouldn’t principles always, any time, come first, or else they’re not really principles?”

  “Sophistry,” Walter said with contempt. “Twisting words. It’s easy to do that and prove any point you want to prove.”

  “I’m not twisting. I have never been more straightforward in my life.”

  “So in your straightforward way you are telling me that you intend to go ahead with this disgrace and be damned to us?”

  “I didn’t say be damned to you! Don’t put words in my mouth! I said the affair is already in the hands of the subcommittee in Albany and I can’t call it back.”

  Freddy’s lips quivered. Leah was fascinated. Hennie looked for a place to escape, but there was none; they were trapped.

  “Can’t or won’t?” Walter demanded furiously.

  There was a long wait. Hennie heard the blood pounding in her ears.

  She could not have known that Paul was thinking: Nothing is as simple as people like my father and Uncle Dan see it. Problems are round. Or many-sided. Polygons. What you see depends upon where you stand.

  “Can’t call it back or won’t?” repeated Walter.

  And Dan said very quietly, “Maybe some of both.”

  “You bastard,” Walter replied, also very quietly.

  No one moved. For a moment the silence was absolute, until Walter broke it again.

  “Look at your wife! Her face is burning! If she weren’t as young and healthy as she is, she would be having a stroke because of what you’re doing.”

  Florence began to cry again.

  “Stop it, Florence,” commanded Angelique. “He isn’t worth it and never was from the beginning. I knew it from the first moment I laid eyes on him.”

  Hennie cried out, “Mama! How can you? You’ve no right to say that! No matter what’s happening here tonight! How can you?”

  Angelique wrung her hands, “Hennie, I’m sorry, I can’t help it! God knows my heart aches for you, and now for Florence and Walter, to have this happen here in their home and on their anniversary, this happy night. Oh, dear God, what next?”

  Henry had been so silent in his corner that they had forgotten he was there. Now suddenly he shouted.

  “Stop it, will you? All of you? Damn fools! It’s too much, how much can a man stand?” His face was dark gray. “I’m exhausted! No more, no more!”

  “His heart! Look what you’ve done! Florence, get the brandy!” Walter was distraught. “Lie back, Father, put your head back. Mama is right, Dan, we’ve put up with you, your attitude, your remarks—you think we don’t know your opinion of us all these years? But now to upset this good old man who came here tonight—to my home! for warmth and pleasure, and you—oh, get out! That’s the best thing you can do. Get out now and leave us alone. Now.”

  “You don’t mean that, Walter,” Hennie cried. “You’re not really telling us to leave your house!”

  “Not you, Hennie, of course, not you. We can only be sorry for you.”

  Walter put out his hand, but Dan stepped between Hennie and the hand.

  “My wife goes with me, as any wife would, and when I go, I’m not coming back. And neither will you, Hennie. Leah, Freddy, get your coats.”

  Florence wrung her hands. “Is that true, Hennie? You will stay away from us all because of him?”

  Hennie shut her eyes. Black out the room, her son’s stricken face, Leah’s bewilderment, Dan’s stern mouth. She opened her eyes.

  “Dan is my husband,” she whispered.

  “Husband,” Florence repeated, making the word an insult.

  Dan placed Hennie’s cape around her shoulders and, with his hand on her elbow, urged her toward the door.

  Walter followed. “If you’ll turn from this course, it won’t be too late. We can forget what’s been said. I’m willing. Just turn—”

  But Dan, without answering, had already opened the door and gone down the stoop to the street. Hennie wanted to look back; surely someone would come hurrying to say that what had happened had really not happened! But humiliation kept her from looking. She had to run to keep up with Dan’s pounding strides.

  In silence, they hurried through the wind toward the avenue to catch the downtown trolley.

  This rift would never be made up, not with Florence, anyway. Parents were different; they would come around, but Florence owed allegiance to the Werners, as Hennie did to Dan. When the news came out—oh, she’d read in the papers about these investigations, had seen how the reformer could blacken the names of the most respectable and respected—how scandalizing for the Werners, for Florence! And a wave of purest regret caught in Hennie’s throat. Florence was good, she was a sister.

  And Paul, she thought. I shall lose him too. You shouldn’t have let
this happen, Dan.

  The snow began to come hard when they climbed into the trolley. Big wet flakes struck the windows and oozed down the pane, blurring the glow of streetlamps. On 23rd Street green lights flashed in the shape of a giant pickle, erected by Heinz. Passengers craned to look at the marvel, which was somehow comical as well as marvelous.

  “Look,” she said softly to Freddy and Leah, who were both silent. “We’re passing the pickle again.” But neither responded.

  She met Dan’s troubled eyes; he, too, had been regarding the boy and girl.

  “I’m sorry, Hennie. You’re very angry.”

  “Yes … I don’t know what I am. Just numb, I guess.”

  “I had too much brandy.”

  “I thought so.”

  “I shan’t use it as an excuse, though. I wasn’t drunk, I never have been, you know that. But those men at the other end of the room, after dinner, they … I couldn’t stand them. They were talking about the Boer War and all the money that was made, and investing in diamonds, while I was thinking about what I’ve been seeing and doing with Veiller, talking to him just this past week. And I was fed up, disgusted and angry, that’s all.”

  He touched Hennie’s cheek with his thick woolen glove. “Hennie?”

  “I hear you.”

  “I thought, these are the same men who wrecked the Hague Conference and who make the wars. Out of their miserable tenements come the poor starvelings to fight in their armies.”

  “Of course you’re right. But that’s nothing new. You’ve been among Walter’s people often enough. And they’re really such small fry anyhow, compared with the Morgan crowd or the oil and steel interests.”

  “That’s so. It was just the way it struck me tonight.”

  “Tell me honestly, would you have tried to stop that report to Albany if you had known who owned the buildings?”

  Dan hesitated. “Maybe I would have been tempted to for your family’s sake. I don’t know. But if you had seen that place—I know you’ve seen plenty, but this was the very worst. Such filth, not fit for animals, and, of course, I always think of fire.”

  He stood in the poisonous smoke on the ledge under the roof, while the crowd stared up and waited, hardly believing what they saw. No one else, surely no one in that house tonight, has so much heart

  “If it weren’t for my teaching salary, Freddy might be living in a place like that,” Dan said.

  “I know.”

  They got down from the trolley and began to walk through the swirling snow. It beat at their cold faces and stuck to their lashes. Dan shortened his steps.

  “I’m walking too fast. When you were little, I used to carry you through the deep snow. Can you remember that far back, Freddy?”

  Yes, Freddy remembered. He remembered everything and would remember tonight too. He thought: Dad’s trying to make amends. And he thought, I shall never see Paul, now that they have fought. Then he corrected himself: No, Paul will find a way, he always knows how.

  Just behind him he felt the presence of his parents as one presence: Mother-Father. One. His mother loved his father; she had been angry at him tonight, and yet now they were walking close together, with their shoulders touching. When he was little, this had angered him, so that he had wished he had no father and there would be just two of them in the house, his mother and he. But that was a long time ago. He wondered about girls, whether they wished their mothers away, and thought of asking Leah, but realized it would be too cruel to ask her.

  So this is the way it is and always will be. Mother-Father. If only Dad weren’t so loud and frightening.

  Now he heard his father’s voice, very low above the sound of slushing feet.

  “Not so angry anymore, Hennie?”

  And his mother’s soft answer. “I’m sad. I never can be angry with you very long, Dan. You know I can’t.”

  And he heard a swift little sound like kissing, but didn’t turn around to see.

  7

  The mills of the gods grind slowly, and seldom more slowly than in a democratic legislature. They do, though, grind to a finish, more or less: In this case, less. After long, tedious, and acrimonious hearings before investigating committees, nothing was produced in the way of new laws, only a reaffirmation of the need to enforce the existing one.

  Owners were castigated for flouting the regulations; as always, outrage and shock were expressed at the wretchedness of the poor in the richest city in the world, and the reformers went home to prepare for another try.

  If the newspaper headlines were not as flaming as the coverage of a murder, they were yet flamboyant enough to bring misery into the prominent and respectable homes of people who had never seen their family name in print except to announce a marriage or a death.

  Feature writers, especially those of a liberal bent, made full use of the subject.

  DISGRACE OF THE CITIES … RICH OWNERS RESPONSIBLE FOR CRUEL DEATHS BY FIRE … CRIMINAL NEGLIGENCE … EPIDEMICS … MILLIONS MADE OUT OF HUMAN SUFFERING ran the headings. In more sober articles, the culprits were examined and named: builders and mortgage houses such as Southerland, Van Waters, Werner.

  In her white-and-yellow upstairs sitting room, where Florence, with a sick headache, lay on the recamier sofa, the Sunday paper, which had brought on the headache, was scattered on the floor. The family had gathered to commiserate. Angelique had come hastening; Alfie and Emily had walked the few blocks from their apartment in the Dakota.

  “I’m glad my parents are in Florida.” Walter sighed. “They’ll have the New York papers, of course, but somehow I think distance softens the blow.”

  Alfie assured him cheerfully, “By the time they get back in March, all this will be yesterday’s news. There’ll be somebody else to pick on.”

  Angelique’s white hands trembled from her jet necklace to the black silk folds of her mourning skirt.

  “Yes, Florence, I’m thankful your father didn’t live to see the end of this. What he did see was enough! His two daughters estranged and now this, visited on poor Walter.”

  “What must people think?” Florence moaned.

  “Pull yourself together, Florence,” Walter rebuked, and pulled himself together. “The people we know will hardly believe a handful of sensational muckrakers. ‘Criminal negligence!’ ” he scoffed. “They should try owning one of those buildings! You put in shelves—they knock them down for kindling wood! Washtubs? They store coal in them! Faucets and pipes? They rip them out to sell at the junk shop. These people come from hovels in Sicily, Russia, County Clare, God only knows where. It will take a century to educate them. I know one thing, though, I’m through. No more mortgages; I’m a banker, not in the real estate business.”

  Paul surveyed the little group. He had been summoned in on his way back to his room after an afternoon at the skating rink. This was another world. At Aunt Hennie’s, the talk yesterday had been triumphant, although Uncle Dan said the law was only a partial victory.

  “All these existing buildings should be torn down,” he had said, “but of course that could never happen, there’s too much money at risk.”

  “I suppose,” Florence remarked now, “there’s great rejoicing in my sister’s house. They think they have defeated us, humiliated my husband and me.”

  No one answered. And Florence went on, “Oh, I don’t want to make any more trouble than there is already. Mama, I know you have to see Hennie, she’s your daughter. Emily, I leave you out, you have to go where your husband goes, and Alfie’s a peacemaker, always has been, though surely you must see that there’ll be no peace made out of this, Alfie.”

  “No, I know I haven’t been very effective. Though I certainly wish you could all somehow get together.”

  “Yes, get together,” echoed Emily.

  The world’s too lovely for Alfie, Paul thought, too filled with good things, fine houses and jovial dinners, to be troubled by argument, disturbing one’s peace, one’s Sunday nap, or even the energy that one must save to get ahead.


  “Not your fault! This cleavage is too deep,” Florence declared. “And now, after this—it’s permanent, I assure you. I will say one thing, though, to Paul. Neither your father nor I have made an issue of this or tried to forbid you, but how can you keep going to that house? We know you go there pretty often, don’t think we don’t.”

  “I haven’t tried to hide it.”

  “But isn’t it time to take a stand for who you are? You’re a grown man!” Her tone was plaintive, much closer to a wail than to a scolding. “To go there and listen to them talk about your own parents—I don’t understand it.”

  “They have never said one word, not one word, about anyone in this house, Mother. I wouldn’t go there if they did. They never talk about people, anyway. That’s not what they talk about.”

  Walter was curious. “As long as the subject has been brought up, what do they talk about?”

  Paul shrugged. “How can I answer that? All right. The Peace Society. Aunt Hennie goes to Lake Mohonk every summer to the annual conference. She met Baroness von Suttner, after she won the Nobel Peace Prize. And Uncle Dan, well …” Paul stifled a mischievous smile. “He talks about electromagnetic waves in space.” They wouldn’t understand any more than he, Paul, did. “He says someday we will be able to get signals from other planets. In the meantime, he’s got ideas for communication at sea.”

  Angelique rolled her eyes. “Typical!”

  “I don’t know, Mama,” Alfie said earnestly. “You never know. He might have something there. Look at Edison.”

  Angelique reached out and patted her son’s hand. “You’re like your father, always making excuses for people. Never mind, it’s a kind trait. And at least you’re a practical man, providing for your little Margaretta.” Angelique liked the sonorousness of the full name, “Margaretta,” never “Meg.” “She doesn’t live in a near-slum, as poor Freddy must.”