Sins of the Fathers

by Susan Howatch

  I tried not to look too amazed. Could this man be the financial sensation of the year? He seemed to be more like some hip DJ incapable of discussing any subject beyond Billboard’s top hundred, and as I continued to regard him with disbelief, I saw exactly why sober, staid, conservative Wall Street was so appalled and affronted by his success.

  “… so I’ll have to see what opportunities come my way,” he was saying. “Hey, Jake’s a great guy, isn’t he? How did you meet him?”

  “He’s an old friend of my father’s.”

  “Who’s your father?”

  “Cornelius Van Zale.”

  Donald Shine burst out laughing. “No kidding?”

  “You know my father?”

  “Sure. He took me to the cleaner’s once. I was cleaned, pressed, starched, packaged, and tossed out into the street in less than thirty seconds. I’ve never forgotten that,” said Donald Shine, flashing me his winning smile again, “and I’ll bet I never will.”

  I was embarrassed. “I’m sorry you don’t have happier memories of my father,” I said. “But no doubt my father’s now busy wishing he’d made a better impression.”

  “Could be!” He laughed again and shrugged his shoulders. “He’s no different from a lot of other guys I’ve had dealings with. Never trust anyone over thirty, that’s my motto.”

  “It’s obviously my exit line. If you’ll excuse me …”

  “Hey, don’t get mad just because I’m not a member of your father’s fan club! Are you really over thirty? You look so gorgeous I figured we were totally, like, contemporary!”

  “Vicky,” said Jake, swooping back to rescue me, “I’d like you to meet another friend of mine—excuse us, Don …”

  I escaped thankfully through the throng.

  “What an amazing man!” I said to Jake. I felt dazed, as if someone had picked me up and shaken me till my teeth rattled.

  Jake’s thin aristocratic mouth curled contemptuously at the corners, but all he said was, “My dear, keep buying his shares.”

  XVI

  “I’m very sorry, Jordan, but I can’t go through with this. I thought I could, but I can’t. Anyway, I’m not sure it’s a good idea for a woman to sleep with her broker.”

  “Is it because I’m still married? My divorce is coming up very soon.”

  “It’s got nothing to do with your divorce.”

  “Is it because I’m younger than you are?”

  “No, Jordan. Anyway, you’re only two years younger. Stop talking as if I were a senior citizen!”

  “Is it because—?”

  “Stop! I refuse to let this conversation degenerate into a parody of a daytime quiz show!”

  “But what’s your hang-up?”

  “I’m frigid, of course. Isn’t everyone?”

  “Frigid! Why didn’t you say so? Listen, Vicky, I know this really great technique …”

  “I’m sorry, I don’t smoke pot. I have enough trouble with cigarettes and alcohol.”

  “Pot! Vicky, I’m a respectable broker! What I meant was, I have this fantastic sex manual …”

  “Jordan, darling, could you please get the hell out before I throw up?”

  “You mean you’re not feeling well? Why didn’t you say so? Okay, I’ll give you a call tomorrow.”

  “Don’t bother. You’d be wasting your time.”

  “You can’t know that for sure!”

  “I know it,” I said. “Believe me, I know it.”

  “But—”

  “Good night, Jordan.”

  I got rid of him and slammed the door.

  Then I went to bed and thought of Scott.

  I had come a long, long way since the November of 1963, and I was now adept at going through the motions of my new life without him, but the thought of sharing that life with another man was still intolerable.

  It was over three years now since I had seen him. He came to New York three or four times a year, but I always took care to be away from the city during his visits in case I was ever mad enough to give way to my most self-destructive impulse and rush to the Carlyle to grovel at his feet. When I returned to the city from my enforced vacations I would always inquire politely about his welfare, and my father would reply equally politely that everything was just fine. I had conscientiously willed myself to think of him as if he were dead, but every spring I knew he was alive, and as the trees burst into leaf in the park and the New York skies became that rare pristine spring blue, I would think of him and live hour after hour with my memories.

  It was spring again by this time, the spring of 1967. Eric was seventeen, doing well at Choate, and had started to wear glasses which transformed him into a younger, very serious version of Sam. Paul refused to cut his hair and was now devoted to the torrid nihilism of the Rolling Stones, while Samantha, more obsessed with boys than ever, pestered me for lushly padded bras and kept a poster of Mick Jagger over her bed. Kristin had other problems; she was constantly at the bottom of her class and cried daily at the prospect of school. Benjamin continued his career as infant monster; one day I caught him sniffing glue in a closet and I spanked him so hard he was quiet for two days.

  My father told me sternly I should lecture the children about the evils of drugs, but I replied that although I advised, I refused to lecture, because lectures might only have the disastrous effect of severing the already slender lines of communication. During a family discussion of the Younger Generation, Rose told me it was all quite different in the Midwest, where no one burned their draft cards and slouched around smoking marijuana, while Lori announced she had complete confidence that none of her wonderful children would get into trouble, and implied it was a pity I obviously couldn’t say as much for mine. Alicia commented wanly that we were living in terrible times, and I knew she was thinking of Andrew, who, having survived one tour of duty in Vietnam, had returned for another and was again writing regular letters home about the war.

  The grass had grown over John Kennedy’s grave, but the blood was still flowing in America, and the escalating violence seemed to permeate the very air we breathed.

  “What’s new?” I said, arriving at the breakfast table on that pristine spring morning in 1967.

  “Nothing much,” said Paul, barely glancing up from the World-Journal-Tribune. “There’s going to be a parade next week to support the troops in Vietnam—can you imagine? The body count’s up again. There’s been another mass murder inspired by that guy in Chicago who knocked off eight nurses last year. Oh, and there’s been another riot somewhere, and another black’s called for total revolution. In other words, it’s just the same old daily garbage, nothing new.”

  “My God,” I said, “sometimes I wake up and think America’s gone mad. Maybe Sebastian was smart to get out and go to England.”

  “England!” breathed Samantha. “The Stones! Mick! Wow!”

  “Oh, cut it out!” said Paul. “It’s so boring living in the same apartment as a sex-crazed twelve-year-old.”

  “You only say that because you’re a spotty lump of fourteen and daren’t ask any girl to go out with you!”

  “Paul, Samantha … please! I can’t take this at breakfast before I’ve had my first cup of coffee!”

  The phone rang.

  “I’ll get it!” shrieked Samantha, who had recently run up a phone bill of three hundred dollars talking to a male classmate who had moved to California.

  “If it’s Billy,” I shouted after her, “you make damn sure he’s not calling collect!” Billy’s parents had caught on to these coast-to-coast calls quicker than I had.

  There was a pause, a blessed moment of peace while Paul read the sports page in silence and I sipped my coffee. Kristin and Benjamin were with Nurse somewhere in a remote corner of the duplex. I could hear Benjamin shrieking, but I paid no attention.

  “Mom … for you.” Samantha sounded cross.

  “Okay.” I levered myself reluctantly to my feet. “Who is it, do you know?”

  “I guess it’s U
ncle Sebastian. The operator said it was a call from England.”

  “Heavens!” In great surprise I hurried to my room to take the call. Sebastian never called except on Edward John’s birthday. I hoped nothing was wrong.

  “Hello?” I said anxiously into the phone. “Sebastian? What a nice surprise! Is everything all right?”

  There was a silence broken only by the hum of the transatlantic wire.

  “Hello?” I said. “Hello, can you hear me?” I suddenly felt faint. My heart had begun to beat much too fast.

  “Go ahead, London,” said the operator.

  “Hello?” I said. “Hello …”

  “Hello, Vicky,” said Scott. “Don’t hang up. I’ve got to talk to you.”

  Chapter Three

  I HAD FORGOTTEN THE exact timbre of his voice, but immediately he spoke I felt as if I had remembered it daily since our last meeting: His flat neutral Eastern Seaboard accent was neither attractive nor remarkable, but he had the trick of speaking without hesitating, and this gave him an air of authority which made it easy to believe in his determination to get what he wanted at all times.

  “Vicky?” He sounded crisp, confident, and cold.

  “Yes, I’m here.” My skin was crawling with heat. I rubbed my eyes, and when I opened them again the room seemed no longer blurred with shock but blindingly clear, the bright colors glowing and the softer shades heightened to a brilliant gleam.

  “Listen, I’m calling about your mother.”

  I tried to focus on what he was saying, but this was hard, because I never liked thinking about my mother. My mother was seventy-four years old and lived in London. I did not write to her, but every Christmas I sent her the year’s photographs of the children and every January she wrote back to say how pleased she was to be able to keep her album up-to-date.

  “Vicky? This is a terrible line! Did you hear what I said?”

  “About my mother, yes. What’s happened? Is she dead?”

  “She’s had an accident. She’s been hospitalized with a broken hip.”

  “Oh.” In my mind I was back in bed with him. I could feel the tensed muscles of his chest and hear the rasp of his breath as wave after wave of pent-up emotion exploded between us. I began to feel dizzy again.

  “I’ve got her out of a Dickensian ward in some National Health nightmare of a hospital, and put her in the London Clinic. The authorities called me, you understand, after she’d had the accident, because in her purse she had one of those cards giving a number to call in case of an emergency, and for some reason she’d put down the number of the bank in the City. She appears to have no friends and of course there are no relatives here. She’s also short of money. Apparently rising prices have taken a toll on her fixed income, and she’s been living in some dump south of the river.”

  I was jolted abruptly out of the past. “I’m sorry,” I said, “but could you please repeat that last sentence?”

  He repeated it and added, “Let me get the operator—this line’s impossible.”

  “No, I can hear you. But I don’t understand. Why didn’t she ask me for money?”

  “She said she didn’t want to be a burden to you anymore.”

  “Oh, but I would have considered it my moral duty …”

  “Yes, she said she knew just how you felt about her. Look, you’d better come over and sort this out. How soon can you get a plane?”

  “Oh, but … I don’t think I could possibly … I’ll wire money, of course, but—”

  “Vicky, I have this pathetic old senior citizen here who’s asking for you. Like it or not, she’s your mother. She looked after you for the first ten years of your life, so presumably you must owe her something, no matter what unforgivable mistakes she made later. And are you sure those mistakes were really so unforgivable? And just out of interest, can I ask if you turned around and began to hate your mother all by yourself? Or were you aided and abetted by someone else, someone I don’t need to name?”

  I couldn’t speak, but a voice inside me was screaming: No, it couldn’t be, it wasn’t, he didn’t, he couldn’t have.

  I felt as if I were on the rack. Again I tried to speak, but again no words came.

  “Cable me your arrival time,” said Scott, “and I’ll send a car to meet you at Heathrow and make a reservation for you at the Savoy. There’s no need for us to meet if you’d find that distasteful.”

  “Distasteful?”

  There was a pause. Then: “I’m not entirely unaware of what’s going on in New York,” said Scott, “and I hear from more than one source that you have a new romantic interest in your life. In those circumstances I fully understand that you’ve no wish to be reminded of a past you’d prefer to forget.”

  “Are you referring to Jordan Salomon? But—”

  “It’s not important. All that’s important at the moment is that you should cable me at your convenience so that I can make the appropriate arrangements. I’ll hope to hear from you as soon as possible. Good-bye.”

  “Scott …” I gasped, but he had hung up. I sat there trembling from head to toe, the receiver still in my hand, and whispered, “Scott … Scott … Scott …” until the operator came back onto the line and asked if the call had been cut off.

  I replaced the receiver but went on sitting on the edge of the bed. I decided not to think about my mother. There was some sort of apocalyptic truth hidden in that situation, but that was all right, I had learned long ago to shove that to the back of my mind so that I wouldn’t have to think about it. Eliminating her effortlessly from my thoughts as usual, I found myself free to think entirely of Scott.

  Suddenly I noticed that light was streaming into the room, and when I went to the window, I found I was taut with excitement. Beyond the window the world basked in brilliant sunshine, and suddenly I no longer felt as if I were on the verge of middle age. My despair was gone. So was my sense of futility and waste. For I was thirty-six years old, in the very prime of life, and the one man I wanted had obviously made up his mind that we should soon be face to face again.

  II

  I decided to say nothing to my father. Since he thought I had fully recovered from my affair with Scott, I had no intention of disappointing him, and although he had urged me to continue the affair in 1963 when it must have seemed I was in the grip of a temporary infatuation, I suspected he would take a very different view of the situation now in 1967 if the affair were to revive long after it should have died a natural death.

  It was also only a matter of months until Scott was recalled permanently to New York. I could well imagine my father growing nervous, tying himself in knots over his Machiavellian power games and attributing all kinds of sinister motives to Scott if the affair were revived, but I saw now so clearly that I could not expect rational behavior from either my father or Scott where the bank was concerned. Obviously I was going to have to mediate between them. They would never trust each other sufficiently to reach a satisfactory truce unless I imposed a solution which would end their ridiculous power games once and for all.

  It occurred to me, not for the first time, how very childish and stupid men could be. It was small wonder that the world, run by men, was in such a shambles, when they persisted in locking themselves into tight corners from which they could escape only by making some violent demonstration. It seemed extraordinary that they never fully comprehended the futility of aggression. If it weren’t for women, men would have been extinct long ago, demolished by their own stupidity, but of course women were stupid too, letting men get away with their nihilistic behavior and accepting their violent behavior as inevitable.

  I had no intention of accepting this particular violent conflict as inevitable. During the past three years I had tried not to think too much about Scott’s future, but as time passed and I realized he was giving a typically impeccable performance as a banker in London, I had thought it probable that he would eventually reach some new understanding with my father which would enable them to maintain their close b
usiness relationship even though they might remain privately estranged. I didn’t seriously believe that my father, loving Scott as he did, would take any blatantly destructive step against him, and I didn’t seriously believe that Scott would ever be a threat to my father so long as he was treated fairly. If I could somehow end their private estrangement, I thought that their business relationship, no longer fueled by bitterness and suspicion, would eventually take care of itself. All they needed was the chance to return to a normal rational coexistence without either side believing he was being conned, and I was going to provide that chance. Those two men were going to be reconciled. A reconciliation was what I wanted, and a reconciliation was what I was going to get, because this was a situation where for once in my life I was in control.

  Power blazed through me like an aphrodisiac. At last I felt strong enough to conquer the world, and smiling at Sebastian’s description of the effete Julius Caesar who had become the toughest man in town, I dialed Pan American Airways and booked my flight to London.

  III

  I announced to my family that I had received an unexpected invitation to spend a few days with an old schoolfriend in Virginia, and the only person I took into my confidence was Nurse. It was essential that she should know where I was in case an emergency arose, but I told her I was keeping the visit to England secret because I didn’t want the children to worry about their grandmother.

  I packed carefully, remembering that English springs could be cold. I also remembered that Scott liked women to be chastely dressed, like Aunt Emily, so in addition to the skirts and sweaters I took one dress with a high neckline. Then I consulted the calendar, realized I had no time to waste, and hurried to the nearest clinic for a new supply of the pill. I had abandoned the pill when Scott had abandoned me, but I had once resumed taking it for a short while when it seemed I might have an affair with Jordan.