Sins of the Fathers

by Susan Howatch

“I’ll just check to see if he’s in conference. Who shall I say is calling?”

  I started to tremble. “Mrs. Strauss.”

  “One moment, Mrs. Strauss.” There was a click as she pressed the hold button, and I went on trembling, wondering how I had had the nerve to disturb him at work. I must have been insane. What a terrible error. Maybe if I were to hang up …

  “Mrs. Strauss!” said Jake in his most casually sophisticated voice. “What a pleasure! How may I help you?”

  I gripped the receiver. My voice, sounding impossibly cool and remote, said, “Good morning, Mr. Reischman. I was hoping I could arrange an appointment to see you.”

  “But of course! When are you free?”

  “I …” My nerve deserted me. I closed my eyes tightly, as if I could blot out the nightmare of my desperation.

  “I have a lunch date I can cancel,” said Jake carelessly.

  “Oh. Well …”

  “Twelve-thirty midtown?”

  “Yes. Thank you. I’ll be there.” I hung up. For one long moment I sat transfixed on the edge of the bed, and then I moved swiftly to the vanity to repair my appearance.

  VI

  I reached the apartment early because I wanted a quick Scotch to calm me down before he arrived. I was terrified of losing my nerve and making some messy scene which would make him regret his invitation. I supposed he would arrive with food for lunch. I would have to pretend to eat, but perhaps I would feel like eating later; perhaps when I saw him I would feel better.

  I left the elevator at the sixth floor, ran all the way down the corridor to apartment 6D, and scrabbled frantically in my purse for the key.

  “Oh, God,” I said when I couldn’t find it. “Oh, hell …”

  The door swung wide.

  “In a hurry?” said Jake, smiling from the threshold.

  “But you’re early!” I said idiotically after my gasp of surprise.

  “I was in a hurry too.”

  “You mean you haven’t got much time?”

  “I mean I’ve got all the time in the world,” he said, taking me in his arms, “and I didn’t intend to waste any of it.”

  The door closed behind us. The light seemed different in the apartment, but that was because I had never before been there at noon. The luxurious living room was shadowed, but the rich sumptuous furnishings no longer seemed alien. I felt as if I were moving into a country which I had never previously visited but which was familiar to me through hours of painstaking research.

  His arms held me firmly. I was now used to him being so much taller than I was, and as I raised my face to his, I closed my eyes, not because I was reluctant to look at a stranger but because I did not want a close friend to see that something was wrong.

  “It’s lovely to see you!” I whispered, telling myself over and over again that I wasn’t going to make a scene. “I wanted so much to see you …”

  “But you’re not looking!”

  I opened my eyes with a smile and felt the tears spill down my cheeks.

  “Alicia …”

  “Oh, it’s all right,” I said in a rush. “I’m fine. Everything’s wonderful. Nothing’s the matter at all.”

  “Ah, you mysterious Anglo-Saxons!” he said, laughing. “The self-control! The discipline! The ruthless stiff upper lip!”

  I laughed too. I was still crying as I laughed, but now I no longer cared, because my unhappiness wasn’t important anymore. We sat down on the couch, and gradually my tears stopped. There was no longer time to cry, because I was kissing him, and when he kissed me, I no longer wanted to grieve. For I was someone special again at last, not just a discarded woman of no use to anyone, but Alicia Blaise Van Zale, very talented, very successful, utterly unique, and one of the most dynamic men in all New York had fallen in love with me and wanted me for his own.

  PART THREE

  CORNELIUS: 1950–1958

  Chapter One

  I

  HE WAS VERY SMALL and had minute features set in a pale oval face. His eyes were closed. He was wrapped in a white hospital blanket and looked like one of the wax dolls my sister Emily used to play with long ago in Velletria. It seemed impossible to believe that he was a living, breathing being, someone who would grow up to discuss the stock market with me, but for a second I pictured him as an adult, tall like Sam but otherwise looking exactly like me, sitting in my chair at the office, laying down the law at every partners’ meeting, running my Fine Arts Foundation, dictating junk to the press, ordering his new Cadillac, and making some pretty woman miserable; Paul Cornelius Van Zale III (for of course he would take my surname later), investment banker, philanthropist, patron of the arts, my pride and consolation in some remote era when I was just a shriveled-up old man with no hair, no teeth, and less life in some grisly retirement palace I had concocted for myself in Arizona.

  “We’re going to call him Erich Dieter,” Vicky was saying, adjusting the unreal bundle in her arms. “Eric for short. Oh, nurse, do take him away, would you? Thanks. Oh, and bring another vase for these new flowers, please, when you get the chance.” Subsiding onto the pillows, she absentmindedly toyed with one of the carnations crowding the bedside table. “Well, as I was saying …”

  “Erich Dieter?” I said.

  “Wait, nurse,” said Alicia sharply. “Vicky, perhaps your father would like to hold the baby for a moment.”

  “Heavens, Alicia, men aren’t interested in that sort of thing! As far as they’re concerned, newborn babies are only damp little bundles which leak at the wrong moment!”

  “Erich Dieter?” I said.

  “Vicky, there’s no need to affect such a repulsive modern cynicism toward what is, after all, one of the miracles of this world.”

  “Oh, God, when do we get a break for the soap commercial?”

  “ERICH DIETER?” I shouted.

  They all jumped. The nurse nearly dropped the baby.

  “Give him to me, nurse,” said Alicia, scooping the bundle out of the nurse’s arms and adjusting it with great competence. “Leave us now, please. There’s nothing else Mrs. Keller requires at present.”

  “Stop!” shouted Vicky in a voice almost as loud as mine. “I never said you could hold him! I refuse to let the two of you commandeer him—he’s mine, not yours to dispose of as you think fit!”

  Sam chose that moment to walk into the room with an armful of yellow roses.

  “Oh, God!” cried Vicky, bursting into tears. “I can’t stand more flowers—I’m beginning to feel I don’t exist except as some sort of machine which has to be fueled with bouquets! Take them away, for goodness’ sake, and leave me alone—all of you! Go away!” And while we gaped at her, she slid farther down on the pillows and pulled the covers over her head.

  “Please leave,” said Alicia politely to the crimson-faced nurse.

  I was helplessly patting the heap under the bedclothes. “Vicky, honey … forgive us … please … we didn’t mean to upset you …”

  A shadow fell across the bed. “I think you’d better go,” said Sam.

  “But—”

  “Come along, Cornelius,” said Alicia in the schoolmarm voice I detested.

  Muffled sobs made the bedclothes shudder.

  “Vicky … sweetheart …” I was struggling ineffectually to pull down the sheet. “It’s okay—of course you can call him Erich Dieter …”

  Sam’s hand closed on my wrist. “Out, Neil.”

  “But—”

  “She’s my wife, not yours. Out.”

  “What a fucking stupid thing to say!” I was so upset that I lost control over my vocabulary, and Alicia’s expression reminded me that in all the nineteen years we had been married, I had never before uttered such an obscenity in her presence.

  The bedclothes were thrust back. “If you don’t stop fighting and using disgusting language,” cried Vicky, “I’m going to get out of this bed and walk out of this hospital and have a hemorrhage and die!”

  The door swung open as two doctors and
the head nurse blazed into the room. “What’s going on in here? What’s all this noise? Who’s upsetting the patient?”

  “I want to be alone!” wept Vicky. “I can’t stand them fighting over him any longer!”

  The senior doctor looked at us with a cold, bleak, jaundiced eye. “You will all leave, please. I must be alone with my patient.”

  We slunk away into the corridor, Sam still holding the yellow roses, Alicia still holding the baby.

  “I hope you’re proud of yourself,” said Sam, white with fury.

  “That was a disgraceful scene, Cornelius,” said Alicia in a voice of ice.

  I turned my back on them and walked away.

  II

  Telling the chauffeur to wait for Alicia, I dismissed my bodyguard and walked crosstown from the hospital, which was on the East Side. Ahead of me I could see the cool dark trees of the park, but they were farther away than I had anticipated, and finally, losing patience, I jumped aboard a bus. For a moment that took my mind off my troubles. I had not been on a bus since I was eighteen, and at first I enjoyed the novelty of clinging to the strap alongside my tired, shabby fellow travelers, but then I realized I was as lonely on the bus as I would have been with Alicia in the back seat of my Cadillac, and on the other side of the park it was a relief to elbow my way out onto the sidewalk.

  Central Park West was a roaring mass of rush-hour traffic. I walked downtown slowly, my hands thrust deep into my pockets, and tried to identify the different models of automobile which crawled past me. I liked cars, although I seldom drove; a man in my position just doesn’t go bucketing around behind the wheel of his own automobile if he wants to cut the right image with those who work for him, but sometimes I used to drive out to one of the new highways with only my bodyguard for company, and give my favorite Cadillac some exercise. I liked the power of the accelerator and the thrust of the engine and the submission of the steering wheel to the slightest pressure of my fingers, although of course I never said so, even to my bodyguard. It might have seemed childish, and a man in my position has to be very careful to do nothing which might lay him open to ridicule. Nothing deflates a powerful facade quicker than mockery; that was a fact of life I learned long ago when I had been stripping power from other people in order to survive in a hostile world.

  Reaching the Dakota, I took the elevator to Teresa’s sixth-floor apartment, which faced east across the park.

  “Hi!” she said, startled, emerging from her studio just as I removed my key from the front door. “What a surprise! I thought you’d be all tied up holding the baby and drinking champagne!”

  “Forget it.” I stepped past her without a kiss and trudged into the kitchen. As usual it was in chaos. Plates were stacked high, dirty pots littered the stove, the table was a mess of unidentifiable food that smelled ripe for the garbage. The huge furry brown cat which Teresa somehow managed to love was chewing something in a corner. The floor was dirty.

  “Honey, don’t go in there—it’s a pigsty. Come and sit in the living room.”

  “I was looking for a drink.”

  “Why didn’t you say so? I’ll fix you something right away!” She was wearing a stained beige smock over skintight black pants, and her feet were encased in an old pair of slippers punctured at the toes to display the chipped red paint of her toenails. Her hair looked as if it had had an accident at the beauty parlor. As her dark eyes regarded me shrewdly, I noticed that her full lush mouth was unmarked by lipstick, an indication that her work had been going too well to allow her to pause to put on makeup before rushing to the studio at the start of the day.

  “Sorry I look like a Polish joke,” she said later, giving me a glass of Scotch and water. “I’ll go and shower while you relax.”

  As soon as I heard the bathroom door close, I moved noiselessly into the studio for a look at the new work. It seemed to be a picture of some kind of funeral, though it was hard to be sure. Whatever it was, it still needed a lot of work. I decided I did not like this drift of Teresa’s toward postimpressionism. It was too derivative and there was no money in it; if people are going to spend money acquiring that kind of junk, they want the real thing, not a third-rate imitation, and anyway Teresa’s talent was wasted in this inexplicable pursuit of a postimpressionist ambience. Her natural pristine style, which she had temporarily abandoned (And why? Guilt? Did she unconsciously associate it with selling out? God only knew, I certainly didn’t), was directly at odds with this new blurry groping for artistic effect, and as I moved from the studio to the bedroom, I wondered, depressed, if she were on the brink of peppering her canvases with little dots, like Seurat. I’d have to say something if she did; I wouldn’t be able to keep my mouth shut, but I was always very careful what I said to Teresa about her work, and although I was honest, I was never destructive. Paintings are like an artist’s children, and you don’t go telling a mother to her face what a godawful job she’s made of bringing up her child.

  Shying away from all thought of children, I quickened my pace to the bedroom.

  The bed was unmade, the vanity awash with trash from a dozen dimestores, stockings scattered over the floor, clothes flung haphazardly over a chair. Another cat snoozed on a pile of dirty washing. Below a poster of Lenin, looking fierce, the works of left-wing writers were stacked in piles on the mantel, and I thought again, as I had thought once or twice before, that Teresa was going to have to shed her casual interest in communism. There was no future in the arts nowadays for anyone with un-American leanings, and if she wanted to remain alive and well and exhibited regularly in New York, the poster of Lenin would have to go, to be replaced perhaps by a poster of Clark Gable dressed as Rhett Butler. Gone with the Wind was as American as apple pie.

  Without moving his position, the cat opened his yellow eyes to stare at me from his pile of dirty washing. I sipped my Scotch and stared back. I outfaced him. He had just closed his eyes again when Teresa, clad in a hideous striped towel, emerged from the bathroom, slumped down on the tumbled sheets beside me, and stretched her arms luxuriously above her head as she tossed the towel aside.

  I set down my glass, shed my clothes, and took her.

  The cat watched us occasionally with his blank yellow eyes.

  “Like another drink?” said Teresa when it was over.

  “No, thanks.”

  We lay side by side. I was feeling as I had felt on the crosstown bus, surrounded by shabbiness, in close proximity with other human life, but totally separate, utterly alone.

  “Want to talk?” she said.

  “Not much.” I suddenly remembered my first wife, Vivienne, complaining how offensive it was when a man lacked even the most rudimentary postcoital good manners, and with an immense effort I pulled myself together. If I was fool enough to treat Teresa as if she could be rented, I might wake up one morning to find she had torn up our rental agreement and hired herself out to someone else.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, kissing her on the mouth and letting my hand rest for a moment on her breast. “I know I’m behaving badly, but it’s been a rough day.”

  She kissed me back, gave my hand a squeeze, and slid out of bed. “Let’s eat something—I haven’t eaten all day, and I’m starved. I’ll fix you something nice. What would you like?”

  “A hamburger.”

  What I liked best about Teresa was that she never pestered me with stupid questions. She just asked what I wanted and got on with the job of providing it. At her best she never even asked; she diagnosed my state of mind and wrote her own prescription. I was sure she liked me, but underneath that sluttish exterior the mind that produced those well-ordered paintings was essentially detached. Of course I was never fool enough, despite all the things she said when I was inside her, to believe that she loved me.

  “Ketchup,” she muttered, hunting around the kitchen closets.

  “Over there on top of the cat food.”

  Artists are strange people. Kevin often regaled me with that fatuous remark attributed to Sc
ott Fitzgerald: “The very rich are different from you and me.” But I’m on Hemingway’s side. The very rich are no different; they just have more money. The real difference in this world is not between the rich and the poor but between those who create and those incapable of creation. I’m Cornelius Van Zale, forty-two years old, and in common with numerous blue-collar workers making some pittance a week, I’m proud of my family, I work goddamned hard Monday through Friday, and I like drinking an occasional glass of beer and playing a game of checkers and watching baseball whenever I get the chance. But although Teresa Kowalewski, twenty-six years old, may enjoy cooking, going shopping, and all the other typical feminine pursuits as much as any Westchester housewife, when that canvas calls, all these occupations become a blinding irrelevance, and if they persist in cluttering the landscape, some emotional disaster is sure to follow. Sometimes I think artistic talent must resemble a malign mutation of the human brain. It’s scarcely conceivable that a person can inhabit both the outer world of normal people and the inner world of the creative and still stay sane. No wonder Van Gogh went to pieces and Munch painted screams and Bosch was fixated with hell. Imagine living with such scenes in your mind and then going out to buy bread from some fool who chatted about the weather.

  Sam thought I owned Teresa, but he was wrong. No man owned Teresa, because no man, not even the richest man on earth, could ever buy her away from her art. I know about artists. I’ve studied them with the same interest as an anthropologist who studies some culture utterly different from his own. I’m fascinated primarily by how artists can make something out of nothing. It’s power, of course—not my kind of power, but still power, something which in certain circumstances can far outdistance my kind of power, a mysterious force, an enigmatic miracle, a wrestler’s lock on eternity.

  I made a renewed effort to be pleasant and sociable. “The baby was very cute,” I said, watching the ketchup drip glutinously onto my hamburger, “and so small it was hard to believe he was real.”