I trusted my sister, but we had drifted apart over the years, particularly when she had returned to live in that dump Velletria after the war. I trusted Paul’s Sylvia, whom I had always greatly admired, but she lived three thousand miles away. My mother had died in 1929. My stepfather, whom I had never liked, was dead. My own father, an Ohio farmer whom I was supposed to resemble, had died when I was four. Even Paul himself, the great-uncle who had adopted me in his will, had been dead for twenty-four years—and had never cared much for me during his lifetime. The knowledge of his indifference still hurt, although since I was the only person who knew the indifference had existed, it was easy for me to bury the knowledge along with all my other past memories which I was determined never to resurrect. In fact I made a cult of respecting Paul’s memory, so that no one would ever guess how much I resented him for that casual indifference, which might, if he had lived, have been translated into active dislike.
However, there was no doubt that despite Paul’s antipathy he had given me everything I wanted, and so I supposed it was right that I should respect his memory. Certainly I was glad I had been a Van Zale protégé. Would I have made it to the top without Paul’s help? Almost certainly yes, but it would have taken me longer. Paul’s backing had provided an invaluable shortcut to me as I set out along the road to power, although that hardly mattered now, because it was all so long ago. All that mattered at the moment was that Paul was dead and couldn’t help me with my problems.
Apart from my family, there remained only the three friends who had known me when I was nobody, just undersized, underestimated Cornelius Blackett from Velletria, Ohio. Sam I was no longer one hundred percent sure I trusted. Kevin amused me, but it would never have occurred to me to have a serious conversation with a homosexual, while Jake … But yes, I trusted Jake. He lived my kind of life and had my kind of business problems. Jake was probably the one true friend I had left, but the fact remained that we had no communication on a personal level. We talked about finance, politics, and art but never about our families, and I knew why. A man who loves his wife and believes strongly in marital fidelity can have little to say to a man who hasn’t slept with his wife in years and lays as many women as possible in his spare time. I would never have criticized Jake; I was hardly in a position to criticize him after I began my affair with Teresa, but the difference in our private lives continued to present a barely perceptible but ever-present barrier between us.
I turned on the light again to let Alicia know I was awake. Then I turned it off and waited. Still nothing. Obviously she was asleep. Lucky Alicia. I wondered if she had ever followed my advice and taken a lover, but it seemed unlikely. Alicia was not promiscuous, and as everyone knows, only promiscuous women enjoy extramarital sex. Women don’t have erotic thoughts the way men do anyway. When they see a man they don’t picture him naked and calculate the size of his erection. They imagine him wearing a tuxedo and giving them two dozen red roses while the violins in the background play “The Blue Danube.” Women are romantic. They dream about love, not sex, and Alicia wasn’t in love with anyone else. If she was, I would have known.
Anyway she was sick of sex, that was obvious. I didn’t blame her either, after all I’d put her through.
I got up again, went to the bathroom, used the toilet, flushed it, and wandered aimlessly back to the bedroom. At the window I looked out over Central Park and thought of all the hundreds of people I knew in the city, the acquaintances attached to my business and social life. Surely there must be someone I could talk to! It didn’t have to be a deep meaningful conversation. Just an informal chat would take the edge from the discomfort of insomnia.
I went downstairs to the library.
I had five address books. Number one contained the names of people I liked enough to invite to small dinner parties, number two covered larger dinner parties, number three cocktail parties, number four dances, and number five exhibitions. My personal secretary had cross-indexed them in a card file which was kept meticulously up to date, and every six months Alicia herself revised the books, shuffling people into different categories, bringing new people in and dropping old people out. Alicia always knew whom I wanted to see and how often I wanted to see them.
I was halfway through address book number one when I realized it was much too late to call anyone in New York. I went on flipping over the pages while I debated whether to call Sylvia in San Francisco, but I knew Sylvia would want to talk about the baby and I felt I had had more than enough of little Eric Keller for that day.
The S page fell open beneath my fingers and I saw the entry “Sullivan.”
For one split second I was back, back in the past, back with Steve, back knowing he’d wipe me out if he could, back with blood, murder, and mayhem, back at Emily’s frightful wedding, back, back, back into the appalling past, back to Steve quitting Van Zale’s but still trying to smash me in the teeth, back to the schemes and the machinations, back to his death on that English country road, back to the woman who’d backed Steve to the hilt, broken up Emily’s marriage, and turned Paul against me, back to Dinah Slade outwitting me with the grand suicidal gesture which had destroyed her, back to all those deaths, all that blood, all that guilt, but no, my hands were clean, I’d washed them and washed them, and now I knew there was no guilt, I knew I’d been driven to do what I did, I knew the past was dead and there’d be no resurrection, never, never, never.
I heaved the concrete slab of my will over the grave of my memories and obliterated all thought of the past from my mind.
Sullivan, Scott. 624 E. 85, NYC.
I relaxed. Scott was my boy, not a son exactly, because he was only eleven years my junior, but perhaps a much younger brother. Steve had tossed him aside sixteen years ago—sixteen years, seven months, and five days ago, the same day I had discovered I would have no son of my own. That was the day Steve had walked out on Emily to chase after Dinah Slade. He had had two sons by an earlier marriage, but he had junked them as if they were of no importance, just as he had junked his two daughters by Emily. The younger son, Tony, had always been a problem to me, but I had not seen him again after 1939, when he had gone to live in England, and in 1944 he had been killed in the war. However, Scott had survived the war and Scott was quite different from both his brother and his father; in fact, I never even thought of Steve and Tony when I was with Scott.
Scott was no boisterous wheeler-dealer, tossing off God knows how much liquor a day and seducing every woman in sight. Scott was low-keyed. And Scott was smart. He knew about all kinds of interesting things. Scott was quiet but he could put on a good social manner which the clients liked, just as he could put on a tough front which made the clients respect him. Scott was tough. I liked that. Men who don’t drink, don’t smoke, and (maybe) don’t have sex are usually degenerates with all their perversions buttoned up, but Scott was normal—I was sure he was normal because I had spent so much time with him and I would have sensed if something had been seriously wrong. I had looked after him all the way through adolescence, and I was proud of the way he had turned out. In fact I liked him far better than either of my stepsons, although I had always gone to extraordinary lengths to conceal this from Alicia.
Scott was a night owl, often up till two in the morning reading his latest highbrow book. I normally have no time for highbrows, but Scott never made a fetish of all that useless knowledge, never showed off, never looked down on anyone who wasn’t as well-educated as he was. Besides, one could talk to him for hours and never realize he was a highbrow, because he could deal with realities as ably as he could deal with some high-flown intellectual theory. I respected Scott’s grasp of the realities of life. The reason why Sam was neurotic about Scott was that he totally failed to understand how realistic Scott was. Scott hated his father and had long ago written him off. Scott liked me. I had cared for him, taken trouble over him, done everything possible to ensure he would have a fine career—and that meant something to Scott. In fact, it meant everything. If we
had been characters in one of Kevin’s plays, Scott would have been harboring some huge grudge against me for ruining his father, and retribution would be hovering in the wings, but that only goes to show what junk even the best literature can be. Scott wasn’t waiting to nail me. He was too fond of me, and anyway, even if he had hated my guts, his grasp of the realities of life was so firm that he would have abandoned all hope of revenge. There are some men who just can’t be nailed. They’re too powerful—and that, in the final analysis, is what my kind of power is all about. I’m communicating with people. I’m flashing out a message which tells people they have to get along with me and treat me with respect, and Scott had got that message long ago, received it loud and clear, and now I knew I was free to enjoy my friendship with him without any neurotic fears and anxieties. In fact, I secretly relied very much on my friendship with Scott. My world would have been a far lonelier place without him.
I picked up the phone.
“Yes?” said Scott on the first ring.
“Hi Scott! Cornelius. Are you sleeping?”
“No, I’m reading the Venerable Bede.”
That was what I liked about Scott. Every other person in New York was probably sleeping, making love, getting drunk, or watching television, but Scott was doing something truly stimulating.
“Venerable who?” I said, already enjoying myself.
“Bede. He was a very literate eighth-century monk who lived in the north of England. I’m just reading his history of the Anglo-Saxon church.”
“Not exactly a book-club selection!”
“Maybe it should be. He’s talking about matters of universal human interest.”
“Such as?”
“The brevity of life and the ignorance of man.”
“My God! Say, Scott, come on over and tell me about it—I’ll send a Cadillac.”
“Spare the chauffeur. I’ll take a cab.”
I sighed with relief. The emptiness of the night was dissolving, and for a brief time I could forget my troubles by pondering with Scott on the warnings of some poor old monk. Hurrying upstairs, I flung on a pair of pants and a sweater, laced up my sneakers, and then returned to the library to wait for him.
VI
He arrived ten minutes later, a tall, spare man of thirty-one with black hair cut very short and black eyes set deep in a pale, tough face. He had that look of someone who ought to be reckoned with. I liked it. I did not underestimate it—I never underestimated the dangers of restless ambitious men bent on carving out a comfortable niche for themselves—but I had had nearly a quarter of a century’s experience in dealing with such people and I knew how to keep them in line. I never mind the successful people unless their dreams of grandeur get so far out of control that I’m put in the unenviable position of having to wake them up. It’s not success I despise. It’s failure.
“Hi, Scott,” I said, smiling as I offered him my hand to shake.
“Hi!” He gripped my hand and smiled back, projecting both confidence and common sense along with his friendliness. “Are you nuts or something? What’s the idea of hauling me over here at one in the morning to discuss the Venerable Bede?”
“Hell, you know what millionaires are like! They’ll do anything for kicks, as the scandal sheets are always telling us. … Say, after you’ve told me about Bede, can we play chess?”
“I might have guessed Bede was just the bait to lure me crosstown!”
In the library I went to the little liquor cabinet I kept tucked away behind the far bookcase and uncapped two bottles of Coca-Cola. “Okay,” I said, handing Scott his Coke and sitting down opposite him across the chessboard. “Tell me Bede’s views on the brevity of life and the ignorance of man.”
“Well …” Scott offered me a stick of chewing gum, and as we sat chewing companionably together I thought how odd it was that the two of us, living in a country Bede had never heard of, should be discussing his views twelve hundred years after his death. The immortality of artists and thinkers struck me again, and once more I felt restless at the thought of a power which had passed me by.
“Bede’s telling a story,” said Scott, still chewing, “about the conversion to Christianity of one of the great English kings, Edwin of Northumbria. Edwin was conferring with his thanes—his aides—about whether he should take the plunge and turn Christian. Well, there they are, sitting around in the Witenagemot—the boardroom—and trying to figure out their options. It’s a big decision, because if Edwin turns Christian, all the rest of them have to turn Christian too, but finally one of the guys says, ‘Look, let’s try the new religion—what have we got to lose? We don’t know a damned thing. Human life is like the flight of a sparrow when the sparrow flies into a lighted hall in the depths of winter, pauses for a moment in the warmth, and then flies out of the door at the far end into the night again.’ Or, to put it baldly: We don’t know where we come from, we don’t know where we’re going, and our time in the lighted hall of life is just a brief flash in comparison with the vast darkness of eternity.”
I tried to concentrate on the essentials. “Did Edwin turn Christian?”
“Sure. They all figured any religion which offered increased enlightenment was worth a try.”
“And what happened to Edwin?”
“He got wiped out by his great heathen enemy Cadwalla, and the English relapsed into paganism.”
“So it was all a waste of time.”
“But was it? We can’t know that for sure. Obviously there were people who turned Christian, because of Edwin’s conversion, and remained Christian, despite Cadwalla’s victory. Don’t forget, Christianity triumphed in the end.”
“That can’t have been much consolation to Edwin when he got wiped out!”
“How can you be so sure? Edwin died for something he believed in, for a belief he thought would ultimately prevail.”
“Yes, but that doesn’t alter the fact that he died a failure!”
“Doesn’t it? Doesn’t that depend on how you define success and failure? Doesn’t that depend on what things you consider important? And aren’t you assuming death always represents failure, although that’s not necessarily so?”
I immediately thought of my enemy Dinah Slade dying for her country at Dunkirk after a successful, satisfying life.
“Can’t think why you read all this depressing ancient history, Scott. Let’s play chess.”
We began to play. After a while I said, “Do you really believe that, Scott—that life’s no more than a sparrow’s flight through a lighted hall?”
“Don’t you?”
“Well … makes life seem kind of senseless, doesn’t it?”
“Life is senseless,” said Scott. “That’s why it’s so interesting to read the philosophers who try and shape the world into some kind of order.”
“Why bother? God invented the world, and that’s that.”
“But do you believe in God, Cornelius?”
“Of course. All sensible people do. There must be a starting point in creation, and that point’s God.” I casually captured a pawn. “Your move.”
“But that’s what’s so interesting, Cornelius. Not all sensible people do believe in God. Before the advent of Buddhism, for instance, the Chinese had no concept of God at all. In other words, a quarter of the human race lived and died for centuries without feeling the need to believe in a supreme being.”
“Well, the Chinese are odd, of course. Everyone knows that.” I poured myself some more Coke. “Personally,” I said after he had made his move, “I don’t think life’s so senseless at all, in fact it seems very well-arranged to me. I certainly know what my life’s all about. I’ve been put in charge of great wealth and I have a moral duty to use it to benefit as many people as possible. This I try to achieve through my Fine Arts Foundation and my charities.”
“Fair enough.”
“I have a wonderful family, I love my work, and I lead a successful, rewarding life. I’m very fortunate and happy.”
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��That’s great,” said Scott warmly, “but personally I think it’s a waste of time to ask yourself if you’ve led the good life, because few people can be objective enough about the facts to reach any valid conclusion. I think the great question a man should ask himself is not: Gee, just how wonderful am I? but instead: Has it all been worth it?”
“Okay.” I thought it was time to turn the tables on him. “You’ve been leading an ascetic life for years, Scott—has it all been worth it?”
Scott laughed. “Sure! I decided long ago that I wasn’t interested in transient pleasures. They’re not important. I wanted to study the supreme achievements of the human mind so that when I ask myself: Has it all been worth it? I can give an unequivocal Yes. The world only really exists in the intellect, so if you refine the intellect, you refine the world you’re forced to live in.”
“You’ve lost me, Scott. All this intellectual garbage is beyond me. Your move.”
Scott edged his knight away from my bishop. “Okay, forget me—let’s turn to you. Has it all been worth it, Cornelius?”
“Of course! I’d do it all again! I’ve always done my best to lead a decent productive life, and one can’t do more than one’s best.”
“Indeed one can’t! Your God must be pleased with you Cornelius!”
“Yeah … well, to tell the truth, I don’t see God as a father figure peering over my shoulder the whole time. I see God as a force—a form of pure power.” I saw a brilliant opening for my queen, but it was three moves ahead. “I see God as kind of impersonal,” I said, debating whether to knock off his knight. “Like justice.”
“Ah, justice!” said Scott. “Yes, justice is a fascinating concept. Your move.”
My fingers closed on his knight. “You mean revenge?” I said casually, very casually, the chessboard wiped clean out of my mind. “Old Testament justice? An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth—that kind of thing?”
Sins of the Fathers Page 28