“No, I’m not interested in Old Testament justice, and I find revenge intellectually boring. To chase one’s enemy with a meat ax presents no challenge to the mind at all. Revenge is man playing God. I’m more interested in God playing God—or, to put it in nontheological jargon, in natural justice.”
“How do you mean? Are you talking about so-called ‘poetic justice’—‘we reap what we sow’ and all that garbage?”
“Cornelius, I’m just as ignorant as King Edwin and his thane—it’s no good looking to me for enlightenment! I guess what I’m saying is that I’m interested in finding out more about the meaning of life—like a medieval knight on the great allegorical quest for the Grail. Do you know anything about the Arthurian legends, Cornelius?”
“Yeah, wasn’t there a movie with John Barrymore? You know, you ought to get married or something, Scott. All this talk about Holy Grails makes me think you’re getting as eccentric as what’s his-name, the guy who went looking for it—Galahad. Wasn’t there something wrong with him?”
“He was celibate. In the Middle Ages chastity was supposed to give a man superhuman strength.”
“A nervous breakdown more likely. You’re not really celibate, are you, Scott?”
“Are you asking me if I’m a virgin?”
“Not exactly. I’m sure you’ve …”
“Tried sex? Of course. Doesn’t everyone?”
“With girls?” I said in a sudden panic.
“What extraordinary questions you ask sometimes, Cornelius! Yes, with girls. Why shove a key down a crack when it’ll fit in the lock?”
I relaxed, smothering a gasp of relief. That was my boy talking at last, sane practical normal Scott with his firm grasp on the realities of life. I got nervous when he became too highbrow to make sense.
“I kind of worry about you sometimes, Scott,” I said, smiling at him.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.” I looked down at the board and saw he had blocked the brilliant move I had planned for my queen. “But I don’t have to worry about you,” I said, glancing up sharply at him, “do I?”
“No, Cornelius,” he said, returning my smile. “You don’t have to worry about me.”
There was a long silence while I studied the mystery of the board between us, but finally I heard myself say, “I may seem sometimes to be sentimental, Scott, but basically I’m a practical man. You do understand that, don’t you?”
“Why, of course!” said Scott, looking surprised that I should ask such an inane question. “Like Byron, you’re interested in ‘things really as they are, not as they ought to be.’ ”
“Byron said that?”
“In Don Juan, yes.”
“I never thought a poet could be that smart!” I said, fully relaxing at last, and shot my bishop sideways to win the game.
Chapter Two
I
IT TOOK US SOME time to settle down again after the drama of Eric Keller’s arrival in the world, but we managed it in the end. The central character in the drama grew out of his first set of clothes, ate, smiled, and did what he was supposed to do. All the women in the family made regular pilgrimages to the crib, Sam wore out a camera taking photographs, and Vicky imported an English nurse to change the diapers while she bought herself a new wardrobe of clothes and began to read detective stories. She claimed these books were full of social significance, although this seemed unlikely; I suspected she just said that in order to back down gracefully from her earlier pose of being an intellectual, but as I told her on more than one occasion, she didn’t have to convince me that Raymond Chandler was more fun to read than Jean-Paul Sartre.
“Women weren’t meant to be intellectuals anyway,” I observed later to Teresa. I was thinking less of Vicky than of my mother and sister, both of whom had inherited intellectual tastes. “You can educate them to the hilt, but all they truly want to be is wives and mothers—unless they’re artists, of course. Artists are the exceptions that prove the rule, but they’re not normal.”
“Thanks a lot!”
“Well, what I mean is—”
“Stop right there, honey,” said Teresa good-naturedly, “before I slug you over the head with the ketchup bottle.”
I obediently kept quiet, but I couldn’t help thinking what a relief it was that Vicky had turned out like Emily. Supposing by some freak of nature Vicky had turned out to be an artist like Teresa! Or supposing—and this was much more likely—Vicky had turned into a nymphomaniac like Vivienne! I shuddered at the thought. However, even Vivienne had felt the urge to be a wife and mother in the end. It hadn’t lasted, of course, but it proved my point that all women except artists were instinctively attracted by domesticity.
I had one thing in common with my sister Emily: a talent for raising children. I knew I had probably been too indulgent too often with Vicky, but at least she had always known I was intensely concerned about her welfare, and children not only have to be loved, they have to feel their parents care enough to take positive action on their behalf. Vicky might have had her troubles in the past, but as I could see for myself and as everyone nowadays was always telling me, she had turned out wonderfully well. I had also had trouble in the past with my stepsons, but now they too were a credit to me. Sebastian had graduated summa cum laude from Harvard and Andrew was already an officer in the air force. Of course we had all had our occasional difficulties, but our family life with its stresses and strains alternating with long periods of happy tranquillity was probably very normal, and having applied myself successfully to the challenge of being a good father, I was more than willing to apply myself to the task of being an affectionate but sensible grandparent.
I was determined not to make a fool of myself. The scenes after Eric’s birth had taught me a lesson, and nowadays I took scrupulous care to behave well in the nursery. It was true I did call at the Kellers’ house two or three times during the working week, and it was true I always brought some sort of little gift with me, but I never stayed more than ten minutes and I never spent more than five dollars. On alternate Saturdays Eric visited us at Fifth Avenue, but I never made a big fuss over the occasion, and if the visit had to be canceled I just said, “Well, that’s too bad,” and never referred to it again. I took a few photographs, but not many; I played with him in the nursery, but not too often; and when Alicia said kindly, “Isn’t he cute!” I just said, “Yes, he’s okay.”
On the Saturdays when Eric didn’t visit us he went to see Vivienne, now established, not in Queens, but in a plush apartment complex in Westchester. Sam had told Vicky that it was in Eric’s best interests that Vivienne should live in a high-class neighborhood, and Vicky hadn’t argued with him, Neither had I. I never interfered, never complained, although I knew the mere sight of her mother always upset Vicky. But Sam was the boss. It was his family, and Vivienne was his problem. I just went right on being the model grandfather and took care to keep well out of Vivienne’s way.
In April 1952 Eric celebrated his second birthday. He was tall for his age, and sturdy. He had fair curly hair which Vicky allowed to grow too long, but again I never criticized or interfered. His dark eyes made him look more like Sam than he really was. He talked coherently. Of course he was very smart. I bought him a huge stuffed giraffe, a tank with a rotating gun, and one of those toys with wooden pegs which you have to smash through a holed board with a hammer. I knew I should have brought only one present, but a second birthday was an important occasion, and besides, I had been behaving so well that I thought I could indulge myself for once.
Vivienne was at the birthday party. She brought six presents, all useless, and cooed over the little kid until I wanted to vomit. Alicia and I left early.
The party was on a Sunday. On Monday morning at nine o’clock Sam came to my office and suggested we have a drink together that evening to work out the family problem.
“What problem?” I said blankly.
He looked at me as if he found it hard to believe I was serious. All he said was
, “I have a meeting midtown this afternoon. I’ll meet you in the King Cole Bar of the St. Regis at six.”
Automatically I gave the natural friendly response. “Come and have a drink with me at home!”
“No, Neil,” he said. “I think it would be best if we met on neutral ground.”
It felt as if an earthquake had blasted through my office and split the ground beneath my feet. This was a power play. Sam was slipping me into a vise.
“Okay, sure,” I said casually, and pretended to return to work.
I spent the whole day trying to figure out what was coming. Three times I nearly called Vicky, and three times I decided against it. It was just possible that Vicky knew nothing about this so-called problem, but if she did, I might upset her by any cross-examination, and once I upset Vicky, I would be playing into Sam’s hands.
I tried to clamp down on my panic, but horrific thoughts were already crawling out of the darkest corners of my mind into the light of day. Was this perhaps the long-delayed stab in the back for snitching Teresa? No, that was surely impossible, since Sam was still crazy about Vicky, and Teresa had long since ceased to be important to him. But in that case, what the hell was he up to?
I went on sitting at my desk, and occasionally, about every ten minutes, I groaned. I had an absurd longing to rush upstairs to Sam’s office, grab him by the sleeve, and plead, “Don’t do it, Sam! Whatever it is, don’t do it!”
I thought to myself: I wish I was back in the old days again. I wish I was back in the summer of ’29 when Sam and I sowed our wild oats and got drunk on bathtub gin and danced to “Alexander’s Ragtime Band.”
I pulled myself together. Nostalgia would get me nowhere. To be sentimental would be to play a losing game. I had to pussyfoot forward stealthily with my eyes skinned for trouble, and if Sam tried a swipe at me I’d disarm him at once and cuff him for being such a fool.
But Sam wasn’t a fool. He wouldn’t try a swipe at me unless he was sure he had me by the—
“Oh, God!” I said, and headed for the liquor cabinet, but I never fixed myself a drink. This was not the time to go hitting the bottle. I could do that later, after Sam had revealed his hand, and his hand was probably just some gripe about how I was giving Eric too many presents. I was being neurotic, trying to turn my best friend into some kind of assassin and imagining I had a guilty conscience. My conscience was clear. Teresa had been through with Sam. I had sincerely believed Sam was no longer interested in her. Teresa had more or less invited me to go to bed with her. I had been the seduced, not the seducer, the victim of a gross misunderstanding.
Just who do you think you’re kidding, Cornelius! That was the way things ought to have been, but was that the way things really were?
“I guess you’ve been to my art gallery, Teresa.”
“Sure. The exhibitions there are great.”
“Well, of course I’m very careful whom I exhibit. I have to think very highly of an artist before I consider exhibiting him … or her. …”
The truth was that I had had power and used it. Teresa, flat broke, emotionally muddled, and worried sick about her work, hadn’t stood a chance.
“I’m sorry, Cornelius—I didn’t mean to tell him about the exhibition, but he wanted to buy one of my pictures. …”
I hadn’t wanted Sam to know about the exhibition so soon. I had wanted a decent interval to elapse to blur the connection between the bedroom and the exhibition hall, but there had been no interval, only an unpleasant progression from one sordid fact to the next. Sam could have drawn only one conclusion from such an unpalatable set of facts, but he had said nothing, and even later at the exhibition he had given no hint that he resented what I’d done. Afterward I’d wished he had. I’d had a set speech well prepared. “Because of my personal troubles, I wanted her very much and this was the only way I felt I could reach her—by appealing to her through her art.” That statement would have made my acquisition of Teresa seem less like a commercial transaction and more like the foolish muddled act of a man distracted by misery; that statement, nauseous though it might still have seemed to Sam, at least had the virtue of being true.
However, no excuses could alter the fact that I had made a seamy proposition which hadn’t been refused. Would Teresa have slept with me if I hadn’t made her that irresistible offer? Maybe. But maybe not. Since she and I had now been good friends for three years, I had thought the origins of our affair no longer mattered, but perhaps I’d been wrong. Maybe they did still matter. Maybe Sam had been far more hurt by my ill-timed acquisition than I had ever wanted to believe.
At half-past five, feeling as if the day of judgment was about to dawn, I left the office, crawled into my new Cadillac, which was appropriately as black as a hearse, and headed uptown to the St. Regis.
II
The King Cole Bar of the St. Regis Hotel is a huge, well-lit room ideally suited to be a neutral meeting place for two bankers who would normally drink together at the Knickerbocker Club. The enormous bar snakes along one wall beneath the famous murals of King Cole by Maxfield Parrish, and the tables are set well apart so that eavesdropping is difficult even when the room is quiet and uncrowded. Sam had picked his battleground well.
I had planned to be ten minutes late, but to my great annoyance I was still the first to arrive, and not wanting to lose face by sitting around waiting for him, I headed immediately to the men’s room. The first person I saw when I walked in was Sam. He was washing his hands, like a surgeon preparing for a big operation, and glancing at his watch. We laughed when we saw each other, and I thought: First round a draw.
“What are you drinking?” he said when we were finally seated at a table and the waiter was hovering nearby.
I had already decided that I had to signal my complete lack of nervousness. “I’ll have a tomato juice,” I said, smiling, and thought: That’ll rattle him.
“One tomato juice, one gimlet,” he said to the waiter, and I knew the second round had gone to me. He couldn’t face me without a shot of gin.
However, by the time the drinks arrived, I was wishing I had ordered a lime juice on the rocks so that I could have switched drinks with him while he was looking the other way. I was sure my need for gin was greater than his.
“So what’s the problem, Sam?” I said after he had finished telling me about his afternoon meeting with the president of Hammaco, a huge corporation which had foolishly slighted us in the past, only to discover the enormity of their mistake. I took a sip of the thick sickly juice in my glass and wondered if any vegetable could be drearier than a squeezed tomato. “Let’s have it!” I said encouragingly. “Cards on the table!”
“Vicky’s at the end of her rope,” he said promptly, and lit a cigarette. He knew I hated people smoking in close proximity to me. Third round to him.
“Vicky? At the end of her rope?” Of course he was exaggerating. “But why?” I said. “I don’t understand.”
“She says she can’t stand the tug-of-war any longer.”
“Tug-of-war?” I said, suppressing the instant recollection of Vivienne’s lavish presents coupled with my gifts from F.A.O. Schwarz.
“Don’t be dumb, Neil,” said Sam, no longer smiling. “You’re not scoring any points by acting ignorant.”
Fourth round to him. I pulled myself together. At least all this had nothing to do with Teresa. “Can you conceivably be referring to Eric?” I said cheerfully.
“You bet I am! You and Alicia on one side, Vivienne on the other, and the three of you always in and out of my house, spoiling my kid rotten, and trying to tell Vicky how to bring up our son.”
“Sam, Alicia and I have never—”
“The point isn’t whether or not the three of you actually dictate orders. The point is that Vicky believes that you do. Vicky feels intimidated and miserable. Remember, she’s still little more than a kid herself, and she can’t cope with all these adults muscling in on her territory with, quote, helpful, unquote, advice.”
�
��Don’t pretend you haven’t got your own ax to grind too Sam! This isn’t just Vicky’s problem, is it?”
He flinched. I scored. Fifth round to me.
“Okay,” he said. “I’ll admit it. I don’t like you trying to take over my son and treating him as if he was yours. It would be different if you were a regular old grandpa of sixty plus and I was a young kid in my twenties. Then I’d just say Gee, the poor old senior citizen, I’ve got to give him some pleasure in life. But we’re the same age—and not only the same age. We’ve got this whole shared past which has shackled us together more tightly than any blood tie. Sometimes I think you’re like my doppelgänger, and that’s eerie, I don’t like it, I can take seeing you every day at the bank, but I don’t want to see you constantly in my own home as well. In other words, I want you to get the hell out of my private life, Neil. You’re being too goddamned intrusive, and let’s be honest, let’s voice a truth we both know: since I married Vicky you don’t own me anymore.”
The nerves jangled in the pit of my stomach as all my most nebulous nightmares assumed the rock-hard rigor of reality. Trying to calm myself, I thought: Sixth round to him. I sipped my tomato juice again and tried to look friendly.
“Hell, Sam!” I said good-humoredly. “What’s all this sinister German talk about doppelgängers? Now, let’s not get overemotional about this. The most important thing is obviously Vicky’s happiness, right? Okay, well, if we’re driving her crazy, we’ll cut down on our visits for a while.”
He said abruptly, “That’s not good enough.”
I finished my tomato juice and signaled the waiter. “It isn’t?” I said with a little smile to show him I was still prepared to be good-natured despite all his efforts to provoke me.
“No, it’s not. The fact is, we want another child, but Vicky flatly refuses to have one while the three of you are hovering around her like vultures ready to devour whatever she produces.”
Sins of the Fathers Page 29