“Why doesn’t he say something?” says some moron in the row behind us.
I have a terrible feeling the play will be a box-office flop. A large proportion of the Broadway-theater audience can only handle musicals and farces, and perhaps a large proportion of them too dislike being reminded of their own emotional failures, which Kevin dissects with such honesty. The critics may go on praising Kevin, but some impresario who holds the purse strings will probably tell him to stop writing in blank verse and throw in a happy ending to keep the morons happy.
I wish I could tell Kevin how great an instrument his verse is. I wish I could tell him not only to stand up to the impresario but to those critics who say that such twentieth-century conversation as “Have you a light for my cigarette?” inevitably renders blank verse bathetic and obsolete. Kevin’s not Eliot and he’s not Fry, but he’s one of the few English-speaking dramatists who dare to strive for literary elegance by shouldering the discipline of meter. He should be encouraged over and over again. He should be cheered on by all those who care about twentieth-century drama.
By one of those strange coincidences which make one almost believe in idiotic words like “destiny” and “fate,” we bump into Kevin himself outside the theater. He’s with some handsome young actor and they’re on their way to Sardi’s. I know I have only a few seconds to express myself, so I grope for the words to thank him for all those hours and hours he must have spent toiling over his play. Just to say “thank you” would be inane, of course. To say “I liked your play very much” would sound as if I really hated it but wanted to be polite. I’ve got to praise it but I can’t just say something meaningless like “It was great!” I’ve got to say something no one else would think of saying; I’ve got to pull something electrifying out of my vocabulary. It doesn’t matter if I exaggerate. So long as I hit the right original note, he’ll see straight through to the core of what I want to say.
“It was a triumph over language,” I say. “You remind me of John Donne.”
“My God!” gasps Kevin. “Why the hell aren’t you the theater critic of the New York Times!”
The actor’s laughing, but Kevin, sparkling as ever, just exclaims, “Pay no attention to him! He probably thinks John Donne was one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence—perhaps related to Thomas Jefferson on the distaff side! Look, for God’s sake join us for a drink—Vicky, persuade Sebastian!”
“We’ll take a rain check,” I say, smiling at him, “because we’re on our way to eat. But thanks, Kevin.”
“Then come down to the Village and see me sometime, says Kevin urgently over his shoulder, and the actor look annoyed, but he doesn’t understand. The actor’s like Elsa. He’ll never understand how exciting it is for Kevin to be compared with a poet who’s been dead for over three hundred years.
We’ve communicated.
“Kevin’s so attractive!” sighs Vicky. “What a waste!”
“It’s love itself that’s important,” I say. “It doesn’t matter how you love or whom you love, just so long as you’re capable of loving, because if you’re incapable of loving, you die. That’s an Ingmar Bergman theme. Have you seen any Bergman movies?”
“No. Sam only liked westerns and thrillers.”
We go to Le Chanteclair on East Forty-ninth Street and have onion soup, ris de veau, and a bottle of white burgundy.
“It’s so nice to have French wine,” says Vicky, remembering all the years of hock with Sam and California hooch with Cornelius.
We talk about our parents.
“What do you think happened?”
“We’ll never know.”
“Isn’t it odd!”
“Maybe it’s not so odd,” I say. “We know so little of what goes on in other people’s lives.”
“True.” She looks nervous suddenly.
“Everyone puts up such a front.”
“Yes,” she says, her eyes dark with memory. “They do.”
I quickly switch the conversation back to the play, and I soon realize she’s understood every line of it. It’s wonderful to be able to talk to a woman whose conversation isn’t confined to her home, her kids, and the latest mink she’s picked up at Bergdorf Goodman.
I take her home. I don’t touch her.
“Say, Vicky, let’s do this again. It was fun.”
“Well, I … Sebastian, this evening was just great, such a change, but—”
“It’s okay, isn’t it?” I say carelessly. “I’m just the stepbrother safely married off. You’re the pregnant widow. If Cornelius reads into this what he read into that goddamned idiotic scene at Bar Harbor, he’d need to be certified.”
“Oh …” She’s embarrassed. “Well …”
“Of course I’ll bet you don’t give a damn now what happened all those years ago,” I say swiftly. “You’ve lived with a man for nine years and you know how easily men get aroused by the sight of pretty girls in swimsuits. And you know too, just as I know, that it wasn’t you that aroused me—I mean you—Vicky. It was just the sight of a female body seminude. It was certainly no big deal, no bigger than the sight of a fat lady salivating outside a bake-shop window, and you couldn’t have less of a big deal than that.”
Her serious strained expression suddenly fades. She laughs. You mean I was no more important than a sugared doughnut?”
“No, you’ve always been important to me, Vicky. It was the incident itself which was so breathtakingly trivial.”
She thinks it over carefully. She probably hasn’t allowed herself to face the memory in its entirety since she was fourteen. I wait. I don’t rush her. This is very important.
“Yes, I guess you’re right,” she says offhandedly at last. She can’t quite bring herself to look at me, but her voice is calm. “What a fuss about nothing, wasn’t it?”
These are brave words, a splendid funeral oration over a corpse we can now duly bury and smother with flowers. I still don’t touch her, but I want to very much. I want to let her know how much I care about her. But I don’t want to let her know that my one desire at this very moment is to undress her and kiss her and make love to her all night.
Vicky needs time, and I’m going to give it to her. I want her to know I have all the patience in the world.
“Okay, Vicky,” I say casually as I leave her at her father’s house. “So long. I’ll call you.” But underneath those casual words I’m very, very excited. The foundations of my dreams have just been hammered into a base of granite, and now at last I can start to visualize the house I’ve wanted so long to build.
At home Elsa’s sitting humped up in bed and looking like the wrath of God—her God, the one who’s so mean the whole damned time, the God who sent ten plagues one after the other to make life hell for the Egyptians. The older I get the sorrier I feel for Pharaoh.
“So where were you?” she says, staring at me with her father’s pale eyes. “What happened?”
“Where do you think I was? In bed knocking up a pregnant woman?”
“Sex is all you think about,” she says, wiping away a tear.
“Sex is all you want me to think about,” I say, and slam away until she’s too breathless to complain anymore.
“Oh, Sebastian!” she says, cuddling up to me afterward. “Sorry I was so mad at you.”
I like Elsa. She’s warm and soft and cozy. I like her best of all when I’m in bed with her, and she probably likes me best of all there too. I’m not talking about sex exactly, or love but just that good comfortable feeling you get when you’re close to someone you know is your friend.
Elsa goes to sleep, large body still pressing against mine and reminding me how soft and warm and feminine she is. I lie awake in the dark. I see no conflict in the future. I’m not interested in marrying Vicky. Marriage is just part of the front you put up for society. It took me a while to realize that, but Cornelius spelled it out for me in the end. “I don’t pick my partners from maladjusted neurotics who are incapable of leading normal lives,”
he said. I got the message. To get on in life you have to make everyone believe you’re normal and well-adjusted. Of course, practically no one is, particularly on Wall Street, but that’s not the point. The point is that everyone has to pretend that everyone outside a mental home is some kind of robot with “NORMAL” stamped on its forehead. When you get married you’re flashing a sign saying “NORMAL, NORMAL!” and everyone stops worrying about you. You settle down, provide your wife with a nice home, start a family, and order champagne and flowers on each wedding anniversary, “NORMAL, NORMAL!” trill the little signals, communicating to the world that you’re a regular guy.
I shift closer to Elsa in the dark and think how nice she is. We’ll be married forever, Elsa and I, no fuss, no mess. There couldn’t be any fuss, because if there was, the Reischmans would grab Alfred.
Nobody’s taking Alfred away from me.
But Vicky’s going to be part of my life too. Vicky won’t want marriage. Vicky’s had marriage, had it up to the hilt. I know Vicky and I understand her better than anyone else does.
We’ll have what in the old days would have been described as a liaison. That’s a good word. It conjures up images of brilliant women reclining on couches, like Madame Récamier. Paul Van Zale had a liaison for about thirty years with a woman called Elizabeth Clayton, who’s dead now. His wife knew about it, and so did her husband, but everyone accepted the arrangement and lived with it. It wasn’t normal, but they all worked so hard to make their marriages look respectable that the abnormality was overlooked.
My marriage will always be very presentable. Elsa won’t like the liaison at first. There’ll be tears and scenes, but she’ll never get around the fact that she’s a fat homely girl who’s unlikely to attract another man, so although she’ll be furious for a while, she’ll calm down once she realizes I intend to stay with her and put up an acceptable facade to the world. We’ll go on sending out those little signals trilling “NORMAL, NORMAL!” and nobody will look at her askance.
Vicky will go on living with Daddy so that Daddy can fulfill his ambition to take over the kids, but I’ll lease an apartment somewhere, Sutton Place maybe, and she’ll meet me there whenever we want to be alone. We’ll fix up the apartment ourselves. We’ll have a bed with black satin sheets in a room with a white furry carpet. I like black and white together. Erotic. I’ll try to find a couple of Beardsley drawings, black and white, for the walls. No, not Beardsley, too decadent. Something with a good clear line, something pure. A Japanese woodcut, perhaps. Or a sketch of a naked woman by Picasso.
Vicky can fix up the living room, but we’ll choose the books together. Lots of poetry. All the usual people plus Beowulf in the original. It doesn’t matter that neither of us can read Anglo-Saxon and that Beowulf is one of the most difficult poems ever created. We’ll have it on our bookshelf for the same reason that the Romans kept busts of their ancestors in the atrium. And we must bring in Bede too, to keep Beowulf company. I still have the translation Scott recommended when I was feeling like a member of a persecuted race. I wonder if Vicky knows that famous passage about the sparrow in the lighted hall.
I think of Scott, talking about Bede.
Scott’s the great anomaly, of course. He’s the exception that proves the rule about people having to get married to prove how normal they are. He gets away with breaking the rule because he somehow manages to give the impression that he’s as normal as all-American apple pie, but he’s not normal, not by a long shot. The more I think about Scott, the more brilliant I think he is. In fact he’s so brilliant he makes my scalp prickle. He’s everything Cornelius detests: one, unmarried; two, an intellectual; three, celibate (mostly); and four, Steve Sullivan’s son. Yet Cornelius thinks Scott’s the cat’s whiskers.
I don’t like that at all. It’s creepy. But is it dangerous to me? I don’t see how it can be. Cornelius is never going to give a controlling interest in the bank to any son of his old enemy Steve Sullivan, so my future ought to be as safe as a diamond in a vault stuffed with security guards, but all the same I don’t like Scott being the cat’s whiskers at the bank. Maybe I should let Cornelius realize that, but no, it would be better to keep my mouth shut. If I try to clip the cat’s whiskers at this stage, someone might try to clip my wings.
What’s Cornelius going to think of my liaison with Vicky? He won’t like it, but Mother will. Mother’ll love it, and Cornelius will want to keep Mother happy, particularly as they’re now having themselves such a ball again in the bedroom.
God, that’s weird.
Elsa moans softly in her sleep, and I put my arm around her comfortingly. I like you, Elsa, I’m lucky to have you. Thanks for making everyone think I’m such a nice normal regular guy …
Saturday, June 7, 1958. Scott and I play squash at the club, and I win. We shower and I have a couple of beers while he drinks Coke.
“… so the question is,” says Scott, “does the English legend of Childe Roland really have any connection with Charlemagne’s nephew Roland, the hero of the famous Chanson de Geste?”
“How can there not be a connection? If you read Browning’s poem—”
Scott sweeps aside Robert Browning, who missed being born in the Middle Ages by a good three hundred years. “According to Dorothy Sayers, there’s no connection. She says …” Dorothy Sayers, as a writer of twentieth-century detective stories, is, like Browning, beneath Scott’s notice, but as an eminent medieval scholar she’s earned his respect.
I listen politely and decide that Scott Sullivan and I have spent enough of our spare time picking over the bones of the Middle Ages. I think it’s time we climbed down out of our ivory tower of medieval scholarship and explored the darker reaches of the twentieth-century jungle where we spend our daily lives.
“Talking of Roland and the dark tower and other medieval structures,” I say idly, “how’s life at Mallingham these days?”
Mallingham is the medieval Norfolk village where Scott’s father, Steve, is buried and where Cornelius’ archenemy Dinah Slade was once lady of the manor. I know very little about Dinah Slade except that in addition to busting up Steve’s marriage to Aunt Emily she piled up a lot of money, made life damned uncomfortable for Cornelius, and died a heroine’s death at Dunkirk.
“Oh, all’s well at Mallingham,” says Scott sociably, just a nice normal regular guy discussing his family. “Elfrida’s entirely wrapped in running the school—she’s had more to do than ever since Edred quit. But Edred’s decision to take the job with the orchestra was probably for the best. Elfrida didn’t like the way he taught music, and there were rows.”
Edred and Elfrida are Scott’s half-brother and half-sister, the children Steve and Dinah produced long before they decided to marry. Only the youngest child, George, had the luck to arrive after the wedding.
“Nice of Cornelius to fund Elfrida like that, wasn’t it?” I say innocently.
Scott’s smile broadens. “Sheer Christian charity!” he says, making me laugh.
I pause for a moment to consider my next move. We all know at One Willow Street that Cornelius and Steve fought to the death back in the thirties, just as we all know it was probably the dirtiest of struggles, with plenty of punches below the belt, but no one knows the exact details of the grand slam—or if they do, they’re not talking. Certainly I’ve never managed to find out the whole story, although I doubt if it would shock me if I did. Where Cornelius is concerned, I always believe the worst, because the worst is usually true.
But what does Scott believe? Surely with his brains and his experience of Cornelius he can’t possibly fall for Cornelius’ official view of the past; he can’t possibly believe that Steve was crashing around being a menace and Cornelius, poor meek innocent little Cornelius, was driven to strike back in self-defense. I can accept that Scott was alienated from his father—buccaneers like Steve Sullivan all too often live at such a pace that their children get lost somewhere along the line—but just how deep did the alienation really go? I have no memory
of Steve Sullivan, who left America for good in 1933, but I can remember Scott’s brother Tony telling me once about the tree house his father had built for him by the beach of their Long Island home back in the twenties.
I remember saying to Tony enviously, “How great to have a father who spent so much time with you!”
And I remember Tony saying with that naive honesty which made dissimulation so difficult for him, “He was the best father in the whole world.”
That testimonial was remarkable and it became all the more remarkable when set beside Cornelius’ regular pronouncements that Steve was totally unfit to be a father and had made a despicable mess of his paternal duties. (Cornelius had a Victorian fondness for the word “duty” and treated it as a talisman which would invariably clinch any moral argument.)
But had Scott ever shared Tony’s persistent loyalty to his father? He and Tony were very different both in temperament and in intelligence, and they had been estranged for some years before Tony’s death. Tony’s mind had been open and transparent. Scott’s was closed and opaque. Were those two minds linked by an identical view of the past or not? Impossible to tell, impossible to guess.
Looking at Scott, I feel an intense desire to open up that shuttered enigmatic mind.
“Do you think Cornelius funded Elfrida out of guilt, Scott?” I say suddenly. “Do you think he was trying to make amends for wiping your father off the map back in the thirties?”
“I doubt it,” says Scott, quite unfazed, effortlessly casual. “I can see him acting out of expediency (‘Let me get rid of this girl by giving her what she wants!’), I can see him acting out of common sense (‘If I’m nice to her she’ll cause me less trouble!’), and I can see him acting out of his famous Christian charity (‘If I help her I’ll feel good about it afterward!’)—but I can’t see him saying to himself, ‘Oh, God, let me atone for my sins by giving this girl a school!’ ”
I burst out laughing, and I can’t help being impressed; this clear-eyed unsentimental analysis of Cornelius’ motives rings so true and the good-humored affection in Scott’s voice sounds so obviously genuine that I begin to think I’ve been suffering from paranoia by imagining treachery where no treachery exists. I remind myself that it’s perfectly possible that he’s fond of Cornelius even though he has no illusions about him. One of the things I found so confusing when I was growing up was that although I detest Cornelius, there are those occasional times when I like him very much, and even, God help me, admire him too. I liked him when he gave me that rabble-rousing lecture on condoms when I left for Groton, and I liked him when he not only approved of my marriage but backed me staunchly all the way to the altar. And I admire how tough he is about his asthma, fighting it all the time, never complaining, never sinking into self-pity. I’d love to hate him one hundred percent, but I can’t, and if I can confess to some occasional twinge of affection for Cornelius, why shouldn’t Scott share my feelings? Scott’s okay. He has to be. He’s just a regular guy with some eccentric habits, and that mind of his isn’t so opaque and sinister after all.
Sins of the Fathers Page 46