The Golden Cup

by Belva Plain

  “Oh, yes, I do feel sorry for Freddy,” Florence agreed, “I always have. He seems so—” She sought the word. “So—remote. And then at other times overemotional. Of course, I haven’t seen him in so long. Has he changed much, Paul?”

  “He’s grown,” Paul said dryly.

  “Well, goodness, I know that! The boy’s sixteen, isn’t he? I meant—”

  Here she was interrupted by the entrance of a maid with a tray, which was set down on the table next to the sofa. Sandwiches, cakes, coffee, tea, and chocolate diverted them from the subject.

  “Have some, Paul,” his grandmother said. “You must be hungry after an afternoon on the ice.”

  He took a plate. He would have liked to get away alone, but they would have considered it rude to walk away from the afternoon ritual.

  It was not quite true that they never talked about people at Aunt Hennie’s house. She always asked what his mother was doing, not, he knew, out of any sly curiosity, but with regret. And he recalled the two sisters at Grandpa’s funeral, sitting far apart in the temple, not speaking, and surely feeling the wounds of not being able to speak.

  He wondered again what it was that made people of the same flesh, born and reared under one roof, so different from each other. Freddy, for instance, born of his parents, was and would be different from either one. So much was troubling that had not been before.

  What most disturbed him was that—as his mother had just said, although with different meaning and intent—he was now of an age when he must know himself. Often he thought of that old, old man Uncle David, now slipping gradually into senility in a nursing home. He had never spoken to him very much, having arrived almost at the end of the old man’s life, but somehow he had the idea that Uncle David, of all people, might have told him who he was and who he might become.

  Uncle Dan was far too extreme, too passionate about his causes and his new world. There was a point beyond which he could not go with Uncle Dan. He knew that Uncle Dan thought men such as his father were evil men, and yet he knew that his father was not an evil man.

  Well he remembered the committees meeting long past midnight; after the terrible pogrom in Kishinev, for instance, how Walter Werner had labored! Organizing, raising funds, giving thousands, arguing and pleading, he had exhausted himself. Had not Jacob Schiff, the wise, shrewd mediator, the compassionate philanthropist, bestowed on him the warmest praise? And Baron de Hirsch, the greatest of Jewish benefactors, and Harkness, who was not Jewish, and—

  No, his father was simply a rigid man who saw what he called “radicals”—meaning those who would overturn a regime in which people like the Werners lived—as being troublemakers, destroyers of a decent and improving order.

  Moreover, there was truth in that. You didn’t have to damn a manufacturer just because he ought to treat his employees more generously. One ought to educate instead. In his father’s office Paul had learned how wealth, well used, can build a city; the great towers, rising all over Manhattan, came not out of thin air or out of Uncle Dan’s theories; they came from wealth, risk capital, and the results of risk were tangible.

  Finished at Yale, and now almost finished with graduate school, Paul would probably spend a year at the London School of Economics, get some international experience, and finally settle into the New York office. He wasn’t sure how he felt about it all. But everyone said that his doubts would sort themselves out; with broader knowledge he’d see his way. He hoped they were right.

  He knew he was orderly and responsible, essential traits for a banker. Certainly he liked everything to be planned; he would like to know right now what awaited him, whether good or bad.

  He would like to know for others’ sakes too. Freddy’s future was on his mind, for one thing. It was quite true, as had often been said, that Freddy was his little brother; he would like to do “something” for him. Money had always been scarce in the Roth household, and was now, if anything, more scarce since they had Leah to clothe and care for; he couldn’t imagine his own parents taking a strange child in like that.

  Anyway, he had often discussed with Uncle Dan where Freddy would go to college. Uncle Dan insisted he would go to City College: “At Twenty-third on Lexington Avenue, where I went; it costs nothing, and he can walk to it; some of the best brains in the country have come from there.”

  Paul had conceded that that was so, but didn’t Uncle Dan have to admit that a change of scene, a new experience out of the city, might be a fine thing too? Paul wanted to pay for it. No, not with his parents’ money, for heaven’s sake! With Paul’s own, inherited and received when he reached twenty-one. It was his and he could spend it as he liked. But Uncle Dan still said no. What stubborn pride! He wouldn’t even accept the gift of a good piano, which Freddy wanted so badly. Sometimes Paul wondered how Aunt Hennie put up with him. Still, that wasn’t fair. A man’s entitled to a fault or two. And anyway, Aunt Hennie was crazy about Dan. She looked at him sometimes the way he’d never seen his mother and father look at each other. It was even embarrassing. He supposed if there was such a thing as a perfect marriage, theirs must be.

  Still, the whole man-woman thing was a puzzle. To begin with, there were two different kinds of women. There were the ones whom in his private mental shorthand he always saw as “white,” probably because their dresses at summer parties at the shore were airy. You held these girls loosely when dancing, having been taught that sweaty hands left stains, and so you barely touched their warm skin under the cool silk. The tops of their heads beneath your chin smelled clean and faintly sweet, like talcum powder. You were careful of your speech with those girls. There was a mystery about them, even about Mimi Mayer, whom he had known forever, almost as well as a man might know a sister. And yet he didn’t know her. A distance was kept.

  Then there were the Others; in his mind, they stood written with a capital O. These were the town girls, waitresses for whom you hung about with your friends, laughing to cover your heart’s pounding; after they finished work at midnight, you took them to the beach behind the rocks. Common girls, his mother would call them, and maybe his father would say so too; he wondered whether his father had done what he did with them. Well, they were loud, and their speech, the words they used when you were naked, were not exactly— And yet they were so sweet, alive and sweet and lovely in the soft summer night.

  He wondered whether everything in life was like that, with two opposing ways for everything. But most people seemed so certain of themselves! His parents in their straight, deep-cut groove; Grandmother Angelique, who was still living in the Confederacy; Aunt Emily, for whom the pleasant rituals of a calm life satisfied all; Uncle Dan, who was perpetually angry at the world and knew without a doubt that he was justified; Aunt Hennie, doing her good works—all so certain.

  Perhaps in a few years I will be certain, too, he told himself, knowing at the same time that it would not be so, that he would always be divided. It was as if there were two roads through the world, and he were walking or trying to walk with one foot on each road.

  Then, being young and hungry after all, he held out his plate for his mother to fill with little sandwiches and little pink cakes.

  8

  In the very last row of the hall, concealed from the podium by the dimness behind a pillar, Dan wore a look of total concentration. Concentration? He was enthralled.

  “Once it was possible to have short wars, quick, gallant victories for individual heroes. A sort of contest of athletic skills, though bloodier! But now—now, because of all the marvelous new machinery we have invented, because the great powers are so rich, wars will be very long.”

  The voice dropped softly into a sigh, almost a whisper, distinct in the absolute stillness that, during the last half hour, no cough or shuffle or creak of chair had disturbed.

  “And unlike those ancient contests, war now spares no home, no woman or child. Here in our country, during the Civil War not yet half a century behind us, we saw what rampaging armies could do. You know
about Sherman burning his way through Georgia. My own parents suffered in Louisiana; it is all as real to me as though I had lived it myself.”

  Here the hands clasped high; a surprising dazzle shot from the speck of a diamond in Dan’s mother’s ring. The pretty gesture was typical: Look, Dan, such lovely eyes! when the boy was born, or Listen, someone’s playing the violin in that house, or on seeing a ragged old man poke in a trash can, My God, how terrible!

  He felt a lump in his throat, watching her. He had actually sneaked into the meeting; this was her first big speech and, very nervous about it, she had made him promise not to come.

  “I’ll meet your eyes,” she’d told him, “and forget what I was going to say for wondering how well I’m doing—or how badly. After this first time, if I do well and I’m invited again, then you can come.”

  He hadn’t been able to keep the promise and was glad that he hadn’t.

  So far he had recognized, had expected to recognize, his own words and ideas. Not that there was really anything to call his own. There was hardly anything original to be said at this point about war and peace. It was now merely a question of pounding away at one meeting after the other, of forceful reiteration to arouse, one hoped, an ever-widening public.

  But his ears pricked up.

  “I recommend to you a book by a Polish businessman—a Polish Jewish businessman, I should say; Ivan Bloch is his name. It’s a remarkable book. It’s said that the Czar called the 1899 disarmament conference as a result of reading that book.”

  She’s read that! She never told me! I haven’t read it myself, I’ve been meaning to.… Dan marveled.

  “It has a lot of technical detail about modern armaments, but he makes it understandable. Firepower is now so devastating that men will burrow into the very earth to escape it! There will be a long, long stalemate. And slaughter beyond imagining. Nations will lose their best young men by the millions. Not thousands anymore. Millions,” Hennie repeated with awe. “It will be the suicide of nations.”

  Again the clasped hands rose; above them the face glowed, the beautiful eyes were enlarged and passionate.

  If any single word could describe her, he thought, it might best be genuine. Never had there been anything calculated, spurious, or fake, neither in mind nor in body, about Hennie. And while she went on to tell of submarine-torpedo boats and explosive-bearing balloons, his mind went drifting.…

  Women he had known: How different they were from her! Women one encountered here and there and everywhere, blended in a way suddenly here now blurred into color, pink and white and cream and gloss of hair, the faces all the same, lovely, dull, self-centered, ordinary—None like hers. Not one of them. And now, even as with pride and delight he listened to her eloquence, he thought of the night to come.

  “It is always said that we need these enormous armaments for secure defense; the fact is that their existence only breeds more armaments on the other side. It is a dangerous game we’re playing, with our alliances and balances and preparations for wars that nobody can win. The Boer War was larger than the Spanish-American, the Russo-Japanese was larger than the Boer.… With all this in mind, men and women must speak out to their governments everywhere. It can be done. If we will it, we can.”

  A kind of music came from her voice. The greatest music is earnest, lofty, and hopeful, he thought, and his eyes filled. Recognizing the rise to a peroration, Dan got up swiftly before he could be observed, and left the hall.

  “If I had known you were there it would have been awful,” Hennie said.

  She was sitting up in bed laughing, enjoying her triumph and his praise. “What are you staring at, Dan? You look so solemn.”

  “Not solemn. Just looking at you. Asking myself how this happened. You and me, I mean. I am so lucky, Hennie. Sometimes I can’t believe it.”

  Her laugh died. She put her hand on his cheek. “Believe it.”

  “When you stood there today with all those people listening to you, I was so proud, I can’t tell you how proud. And I thought, She’s mine, with that bright mind of hers, and all the rest. Oh, Hennie! Do you have to wear that thing?”

  “This ‘thing’ is my Paris nightgown, the last present Florence gave me. I’d better hold on to it, since there won’t be any more.”

  “Well, you can hold on to it, but you can take it off now too. I’ll just get up and lock our door.”

  9

  Hennie had an excellent memory for times and places, and so she was quite certain that it was at Alfie’s country house, on an unusually mild afternoon of a weekend in early spring, when Alfie first asked Dan about his vacuum tube. They were sitting on the terrace, from which height, above a bank of laurels not yet in bloom, they could just glimpse the four young people, Mimi Mayer and Paul, Leah and Freddy, playing tennis.

  “A real family place,” Alfie said, “that’s what I wanted.” A smile of genuine pleasure spread over his face, which was beginning to show chubby folds under the chin. “A place for all of you to visit and enjoy with us. Plenty of room for all.”

  Once it had been the Werners’, but now this would be the house at which the family would assemble: brothers and sisters—except that when Hennie was there, Florence would not be—aunts and uncles, everyone to the farthest twigs on the family tree, would come here to Laurel Hill.

  “Not an original name,” conceded Alfie, “but there really are dozens of laurels and you have to admit the name has dignity.”

  The place itself had dignity; it was a gentleman’s farm, in contrast to the arrogant stone piles that the moguls of steel and sugar and coal were scattering around the gentle New Jersey hills. But any impulse toward such grandiosity, even on the comparatively minor scale Alfie could have afforded, would have been thoroughly quelled by his wife. Emily despised whatever was “nouveau.” And Alfie had quickly learned what was “nouveau.”

  Square and white, then, with green shutters and many chimneys, stood Alfie’s house. An American flag flew from the pole on the side lawn; every morning Alfie raised it and at every sundown he lowered it. Ample fields ran to a background of sumac and wild cherry thickets; behind these loomed the old woods, dark with maple, oak, and ash, a wildness that could induce a shiver of delightful menace when night fell, so that one could immediately lose three centuries and there, at the fold of the hill, behold an Indian encampment with smoke twisting from the wigwams. A Hiawatha atmosphere.

  “This was all farms here in the eighteenth century,” Alfie liked to explain. “It’s said that Washington’s army bivouacked down the road on the way to Trenton. Maybe it’s true. The last owners had it in the family for sixty years. A local doctor. He made a few changes, the porch and the porte cochere.”

  And the iron deer on the front lawn, Hennie added mentally. A homely touch, naive and just right.

  Alfie said mischievously, “I know you would have liked me to build something like Beau Jardin, Mama.”

  “Alfie! Don’t you think I know you can’t reproduce an antebellum plantation in New Jersey? Oh, something scaled down, maybe, with a veranda and columns. It’s so pleasant to have a veranda, and with these lovely views—”

  Alfie laughed. “Mama, you’d have liked me to hire someone like Richard Morris Hunt to do a Vanderbilt house with limestone balconies and turrets, or maybe McKim, Mead and White to do a Newport cottage with a hundred rooms.” And as Angelique started to protest, “Oh, don’t mind me, I’m only teasing.”

  “Well, you’ve done wonders. For a man still in his thirties to have accomplished all this!” Angelique spread her arms. “I must say it was very, very smart of you to invest in Kodak. And I want to tell you I have utter confidence in you. Everything you touch turns to gold.”

  Alfie was embarrassed. “You give me too much credit. The Kodak idea was Walter’s.” Then, turning to Dan, he said earnestly, “I know, of course, we all know how you feel about Walter, but—”

  “And how he feels about me,” Dan retorted.

  “Yes, it’s a pi
ty. Don’t think Emily and I haven’t tried our best. I don’t have to tell you.”

  “No,” said Dan.

  “Well, all I wanted to say was—” And Alfie looked puzzled, as if he had forgotten what he wanted to say.

  Emily came to his aid. “What you wanted to say was just that Walter has been helpful to you with advice more than once and that you’re grateful.”

  “Yes, that’s what I meant. You know, Dan, it’s not as if I didn’t see quite clearly that Walter can sometimes be, oh, the way he talks, you know. How shall I say it? What’s the word?”

  “Pontificates?” suggested Dan.

  “Well, yes, perhaps so. But then we all have our small annoying ways. I’m certain I have.”

  Dan looked amused. “Get to the point, Alfie. What are you trying to tell me?”

  Alfie leaned forward. “All right, it’s this. Walter knows some people, that is, there’s a group that’s bought a small company that makes electrical devices. Don’t ask me what they are, because I haven’t the faintest understanding of those things, but these men are experts. They know what they’re doing and I thought—” He fastened his gaze on Dan’s eyes. “You’ve got all these inventions you’re always working on. Paul was telling me you’ve added a room to your lab, is that so?”

  “Yes, I needed more space to spread out.”

  “Making progress, are you?”

  “Some.” Dan was irritated. As if you could count “progress” like counting the number of bricks that had been laid in a day, when anyone who had the least conception of scientific research knew that for every two steps forward you fell back one, or were perhaps diverted to a completely different avenue.

  “Paul mentioned a vacuum tube among other things, but he wasn’t very good at explaining it. It’s not his field either. He said you felt you were on to something, that you were excited about it.”

  Dan shrugged. “Paul exaggerated. I’m not excited because I don’t know how it will turn out.” He moved restlessly on the chair. And his eyes, grown wider, belied his denial. “The question is amplification, you see, and with a three-electrode vacuum tube, you can produce an effect—” He stopped short. “Wait a minute! You surely haven’t got any damn fool idea of connecting me with some project of Werner’s, have you?”