Sins of the Fathers

by Susan Howatch

  There was a long silence. Then I dried my eyes, finished my martini, and said, “No. That’s a good recipe for handling an inconvenient love affair, but this isn’t just an inconvenient love affair. I want to marry him and I’ve got to handle this right. I’m not going to run after him to London and I’m not going to fall swooning into his arms as soon as he comes back here on his first business trip. He’s got to realize that he can’t just turn our relationship into an intercontinental love affair, and besides …” I set down my empty glass abruptly. “Besides, I couldn’t really leave those children. I wouldn’t be able to bear it in the end. I’d despise myself too much.”

  My father was very quiet. Some time passed.

  “I do love him, Daddy, I really do—”

  “Oh, forget him, Vicky—give him up, for Christ’s sake! My God, I’d even prefer you to remarry Sebastian! No chance of that happening, I guess, but …”

  “None. I could never go to bed again with any man except Scott. He’s the one I want. And he’s the one I’m going to have. I’m sorry, Daddy. That may not be the way things ought to be. But that’s the way things really are.”

  Chapter Two

  I

  “DEAR VICKY: I HOPE it’s okay if I write. If it’s not, say so and I won’t. How are you doing? Since you’re there and he’s here, maybe things aren’t so good for you. I won’t say anything about him, but I’m sorry if you’re not happy.

  “I’ve decided not to live in London after all, as the people I know here are mostly connected with banking, and I want to get clear away from that particular scene. I’ve decided to live in Cambridge. I came here as a tourist a couple of years back and bumped into Elfrida Sullivan in King’s College Chapel and she showed me around. She was at college in Cambridge and she knows it well. It’s a very, very nice place. I like it. It’s a very, very long way from the plastic society. Thank God my grandfather left me some money so I don’t have to waste my time doing something stupid, like banking, in order to earn a living.

  “I’m going to write a book. I don’t want to write a book, but the research will be fun. Maybe I won’t even have to write the book—I’ll just go on and on doing research. Elfrida Sullivan says the world is crying out for the definitive economic history of Roman Britain, and why don’t I do it. I kind of like Elfrida Sullivan. She’s very smart. But I think she’s a lesbian. Your friend, S. Foxworth.”

  II

  “Vicky, darling,” said my cousin Lori, “you look just awful. Is anything wrong?”

  I looked at her and thought of Scott. There was no marked physical resemblance between them, but now I could see so clearly that they had shared the same father. There seemed to be nothing of Aunt Emily about her. Lori was smart, sexy and tough as nails beneath her perfect California suntan, and she had her life effortlessly well-organized. Her children were bright, attractive, clean, and courteous; her husband, now away in Vietnam, had always basked in uxorious bliss; the PTA, the essential charities, and the required women’s organizations were managed with incomparable flair and zest. Lori was a huge success in life and knew it. Her attitude toward me ranged from the critical to the patronizing. I detested her.

  “I’m fine, Lori,” I said. “Just fine.”

  “You shouldn’t drink those martinis, Vicky,” said Lori’s sister, Rose, who was becoming more and more like Aunt Emily every day. Rose was a hugely successful schoolteacher at a hugely successful Midwestern boarding school for girls. All her pupils seemed to win scholarships to the best colleges. She was looking at me now as if I were an object who deserved all the Christian charity she could lay her hands on. I wanted to slap her.

  “Shut up,” I said. “I’ll drink what I like. Why don’t you drink martinis occasionally? They might improve you.”

  “Ah, come, now, darling!” said Lori, exerting her forceful Sullivan charm. “No quarrels at Christmas! Personally, I don’t like martinis—they’ve got such a godawful taste. Crème de menthe is kind of nice, I’m just crazy for that mint flavor, but personally I can’t think why people drink every day—life’s so wonderful, so glorious, why blot it into a fuzzy blur? It’s a mystery to me, but I guess if one’s unhappy or something … Vicky, forgive me for getting personal, but don’t you think it might help if you did something constructive, not charity work necessarily, because, let’s be honest, a lot of charity is just bullshit—whoops! sorry, Rose, darling—but there are all kinds of interesting things you can do in New York City. Maybe if you took a course in flower arranging …”

  “Lori, when I want your advice about how to run my life, I’ll ask for it. Meanwhile, cut it out.”

  “Well, I only wanted to help!”

  “We’re just so concerned about you—”

  “Shut up!” I yelled at the pair of them, and bolted headlong from the room.

  III

  “What’s wrong with Vicky, Cornelius? She seems very depressed, much more so than usual. Don’t you think you should say something to her? I do think it’s a pity she can’t put up more of a front when the children are around.”

  “Alicia, that’s just the kind of criticism Vicky doesn’t need right now.”

  “Well, I’m sorry, but I think it’s disgraceful that after wrecking my son’s life she should be allowed to go on wrecking her own and making everyone around her miserable.”

  “She hasn’t wrecked Sebastian’s life! Sebastian chose of his own free will to retire from banking, even though I offered to reinstate him, and he chose of his own free will to go to England to live. And Vicky doesn’t make everyone around her miserable! She doesn’t make me miserable. You leave her alone!”

  “Shhh, here she is. … Hello, dear, how are you?”

  “Hello, Alicia. Just fine. Hi, Daddy.”

  “Hi.”

  There was a pause before I said politely, “Thank you for having the children for me today. I hope Nurse kept them in order and they weren’t too much trouble.”

  “No, dear, of course not.”

  Another pause.

  “Vicky,” said my father impulsively, “come and see me after dinner tonight. I’ll teach you to play chess.”

  “Oh, Daddy, I’m so tired, so exhausted, so … Did you say chess? But you always told me chess was a man’s game!”

  “Did I ever say that?” said my father. “The older I get, the more amazed I am by the dumb things I used to say when I was too young to know better. Chess is a wonderful game and takes your mind off almost everything. Everyone should play.”

  “But I’m so stupid, I’d never learn.”

  “Who do you think you’re kidding? You’re no dumb blond. Don’t be so feeble, and don’t be so selfish! None of my present aides can give me a decent game, and I’ve no one to play with at the moment. If you had an ounce of filial feeling for your poor old father …”

  “Daddy, you’re monstrous, worse than Benjamin. He always gets his own way, too. All right, I’ll try to learn. If you say it’s my moral duty, I’m not going to argue with you, but I’m sure you’ll find teaching me a complete waste of time.”

  IV

  “Mom,” said Eric, “can you get Paul to turn down that godawful phonograph? I can’t stand it any longer!”

  “But he’s playing the Beatles!” said Samantha with shining eyes. “And they’re fab!”

  “I wouldn’t care if he was playing the ‘Hallelujah Chorus’ sung by God. If he doesn’t turn that thing down, I swear I’ll get a meat ax and—”

  “Christ, what a great day it’ll be when you go off to Choate!” yelled Paul from the doorway. “I can’t wait to be rid of you!”

  “Oh, don’t fight, don’t fight!” wept little Kristin. “I can’t bear it when everyone fights!”

  “Mom,” said Benjamin, “my white mice have escaped.”

  “Mommy, I don’t want everyone fighting.”

  “Paul, play the one Ringo sings—the one about wanting money.”

  “You play one more track from that shitty record and I’ll—
”

  “That’s not Ringo! It’s John Lennon who solos on ‘Money’!”

  “Mrs. Foxworth, Mrs. Foxworth, there are white mice all over the kitchen!”

  “Mom, can I have a cookie?”

  “Mrs. Foxworth—”

  “Christ, I hate living cooped up in a city apartment with a bunch of morons. Mom, why can’t we move back to Westchester like when Dad was alive? I want a garden, I want room to breathe, I want someplace where I can escape from that godawful phonograph—”

  “Mom, Cook’s killed my favorite mouse!”

  “Mrs. Foxworth, I’m quitting, I just can’t take no more, ma’am.”

  “Oh, Mommy, poor mousey …”

  “Mommy …”

  “Mom, you’re not listening!”

  “Mom, Mom, MOM …”

  V

  “Fundamentally the problem that Kierkegaard raised in his work was, ‘What is the point of man’s life?’ ‘What sense can he make out of human existence?’ ‘What is the purpose of human events?’ Kierkegaard attempted in his literary works to reveal an image of human life as anguished and absurd, harrowing and meaningless.”

  I closed the book. It was midnight, and I was in the small apartment which I kept for my private use, the retreat I resorted to when I could no longer bear the sound of voices, the precious haven where I had made love to Scott.

  I wanted to think about him but I knew I mustn’t. I wanted to have a drink but I knew I mustn’t do that either. I had become disturbed about my drinking, not because I thought I was descending into alcoholism but because I was gaining weight, and so I was rationing myself to a glass of wine a day. Surprisingly, giving up the martinis had been easy. Then I had tried to cut down on my smoking, but that had been hard. I checked the timetable I had made for myself and found, as I already knew, that I had one last cigarette to smoke that day. I smoked it and wondered if I could cheat and have another. I decided I couldn’t. I had to do something else very fast so that I wouldn’t have time to think of the cigarette I wasn’t smoking.

  I wished I were a creative person. If I were, I could immerse myself in producing something worthwhile, but instead I could do nothing which could be described as meaningful. I could no longer even concentrate on serious reading. My lack of talent made me feel so useless, yet I felt so sure there was no need for me to lead such an inadequate existence if only I could decide what I wanted to do with myself; I felt my intelligence was like a pair of crossed eyes that might have provided good sight if only they could have been able to focus correctly. But I was still trying to get my world into focus, still looking for a way of life that would enable me to wake up every morning with pleasure instead of with dread and apathy. I was now beginning to think I would never get the world into focus. I was no longer young and my life still seemed to resemble a sheet of water cascading down a drain.

  “I feel so guilty,” I had said once to Sebastian. “Why should I feel like this when I have everything a woman could possibly want?”

  “You mean you have everything that some women could possibly want,” Sebastian had said. “But what do you want, Vicky?”

  It seemed such an anticlimax to hang my head in shame and say I didn’t know.

  “It doesn’t matter anyway,” I said. “Even if I knew what I wanted to do, I couldn’t do it. The children take all the energy I have.”

  When I did have time to myself, I was usually too exhausted to do more than slump in the nearest chair and stare at the wall.

  “I’m nearly thirty,” I said to Sebastian in 1960, “and I’ve done nothing and everyone thinks I’m stupid and frivolous and shallow, and even I think I’m stupid and frivolous and shallow, and yet I know there’s something there if only I can track it down.”

  “Caesar did nothing till he was forty,” said Sebastian. “He was rich and handsome and everyone wrote him off as an effete society rake. Yet not long after he was forty he went off to Gaul, and ten years later he had conquered the world. Not bad for a man everyone had dismissed as stupid, frivolous, and shallow!”

  I thought of Sebastian saying that. I could remember the occasion as clearly as if it had been yesterday, and suddenly I cried out loud to the silent room: “Oh, I do so miss you, Sebastian!” And I thought, though did not say: And I miss you especially on days like today when everything goes wrong at home and Kierkegaard tells me life is harrowing and absurd and I can do nothing but think what a failure I am at everything I undertake.

  I stood up abruptly. Self-pity would get me nowhere. Finding pen and paper, I sat down at my desk with the letter Sebastian had sent some weeks before and began at last to attempt a reply.

  VI

  “Dear Vicky: Reading about Kierkegaard would drive anyone up the wall. Give philosophy a rest for a while. Are you really getting anything out of it? You sound too low to concentrate properly on all those does-life-have-a-meaning-and-if-it-does-what-the-hell-is-it kind of questions, which are about as mind-grabbing as a wet blanket when you’re in a low state.

  “Why not do some real reading? Read something violent and bloody and brutal like Wuthering Heights (how did the myth that this is a romantic novel ever get around, I wonder?), but if you feel this death-obsessed work of genius won’t after all make you feel how wonderful it is to be alive and surviving in mid-twentieth-century America, may I recommend instead that you try a more modern masterpiece, the Four Quartets by T. S. Eliot. Yes, it’s poetry. No, don’t be frightened of it. It’s written in very simple clear language which a child could understand. The catch is that Eliot’s writing of things which exist only on the periphery of human thought. Maybe it would appeal to your philosophical curiosity. I challenge you to read it. Don’t dare tell me later that you chickened out and chose Heathcliff.

  “You’ll find my old copy of the Four Quartets in the second guest room of your father’s repulsive triplex, fourth book from the right on the top shelf. Your friend and mentor, Sebastian. P.S. I regard Cornelius’ offer to teach you chess with grave suspicion. Don’t let him try to take you over again. You’re not his mirror image in female form (thank God). You are you. Never forget that. S.”

  VII

  “He’s coming back,” said my father, toying with an astronaut pawn. “Your move.”

  The chessboard at once became a senseless pattern which hurt my eyes. I looked away. “When?”

  “In two weeks. He’ll be staying at the Carlyle. Why don’t you change your mind and see him while he’s here? I doubt if he could make you more miserable than you’ve been since he left.”

  “Daddy, I never thought I’d see the day when you urged me to go to bed with a man who’s not my husband.” I pushed my rook roughly toward him.

  “Stupid move,” said my father, capturing it with his bishop. I was always forgetting that bishops moved diagonally. “Well, Vicky, you know how I feel about the situation. Morals aren’t much use here. Better to get him out of your system.”

  “Morals don’t exist merely to be useful. What are you doing?”

  “I’m giving you back your rook. You weren’t thinking when you made that last move. Try again.”

  “Certainly not! I lost the rook and I’m not taking it back!”

  My father sighed and moved a remote, apparently insignificant pawn on the edge of the board. “Don’t say I haven’t tried to help.”

  “I don’t need your help. God, with you for a friend, who needs enemies?”

  “But, sweetheart—”

  “Oh, shut up, Daddy, and let me think. You’re deliberately putting me off my game.”

  VIII

  I woke up to the knowledge that Scott was in New York. Scrambling out of bed, I ran to the window, and when I pulled the drapes, the spring sunshine blazed into the room from a cloudless sky. The Carlyle was five minutes’ walk from my apartment.

  I dressed with great care in case he decided to stop by without phoning, just as he had after Kennedy’s funeral, and when the children had departed for school, I hurried downst
airs to my private apartment to wait by the phone.

  I had already decided not to go to bed with him that night. He had to realize that he couldn’t sail back effortlessly into my life, but of course we’d have dinner together, and of course he’d be there, only inches away from me, and nothing, least of all the past six months, would matter anymore. I thought of the secret weeping in my room, the exhausting effort of pretending to be happy whenever I was with the children, my cousins’ pitying criticisms, Alicia’s ill-concealed resentment, my stupid friends calling up about nothing and not realizing, not even beginning to comprehend the hell I was going through, but then I pushed those memories aside. I was going to see Scott again. The future would be very different.

  I had long since decided that I had been too inflexible when I had resolved to sever all communication with him while he was in Europe. It was only common sense to see him occasionally to remind him I existed. Women were hardly about to leave him alone so that he could keep my memory evergreen, and since he’d found one woman who satisfied him completely, there was no reason why he shouldn’t find another, particularly if he believed I no longer cared for him. It was very clear to me now that if I was ever to marry Scott, I had to keep the affair going on a limited basis. I would still refuse to dash over to London at regular intervals, but I was fully prepared to take up residence at the Carlyle whenever he returned to New York on business.

  I waited by the phone.

  The day seemed endless. Finally it occurred to me that he was probably too busy at the office to make personal calls, and I decided I would be unlikely to hear from him before the evening.