Sins of the Fathers

by Susan Howatch

  “He’s not free. He’s never been free. He’s locked up in the past and you’re refusing to produce the key that would let him out!”

  “I’m afraid I don’t see the situation as dramatically as that,” said my father politely. “I suspect the truth is much more prosaic. Scott had this very understandable ambition to get the bank. He’s not going to get it, but he’s had a first-class career as a banker and he’s certainly proved to everyone he’s a far better man than his father ever was—and that, if you want my opinion, is the crux of the matter. So long as he’s proved that—and he has—I think he’ll find in the end that life isn’t such a disappointment. Particularly if he has you to keep him happy. In fact, you’ll play a very important role in his readjustment. You’ll fill the void and give him something new to live for. He’ll be all right. It’ll all end happily, you wait and see.”

  “But I can’t think why you’re so set against trusting him! Surely after Scott and I are married you can trust him to do nothing that would hurt me?”

  “Why should I? Husbands hurt their wives regularly. Scott’s father nearly annihilated my sister. Scott himself may be capable of annihilating you. I can’t give him control of the bank just because he’ll have had the remarkable foresight to marry you and save himself from being fired.”

  I jumped to my feet. “You bastard!” I shouted at him. “How dare you imply that! How dare you twist everything and distort everything and pollute everything—”

  “Not this time, Vicky. This river’s already polluted. All I’m doing is analyzing the muddy waters. Thank you for the lunch. I’m sorry this should have been such a difficult conversation, and please don’t make me regret that I paid you the compliment of speaking plainly. I hope you’ll still consider my earlier advice, even if you choose to ignore my last comments.”

  He moved into the hall and opened the front door before glancing back. “So long, Vicky. Call me later when you’ve had a chance to think over what I’ve said.”

  The front door closed gently in my face.

  I stood there listening to his quiet footsteps receding down the corridor, and then, rubbing my eyes as if to erase a vision I found intolerable, I picked up the phone to call Scott.

  IV

  “Hi!” said Scott. “Coincidence—I was just about to call you!”

  “You were?”

  “Yes, it looks as if I’ll be in New York the week after next. Something came up today, and I’ll have to have a conference with Cornelius.”

  “Wonderful!” I tried to think clearly. “That’s great news!”

  “How are you feeling?”

  “Well, now that you mention it, I feel as if I’ve been beaten over the head. Is it my imagination or does jet lag really get worse as one gets older?”

  “For one bad moment I thought you meant you’d been engaged in hand-to-hand combat with your father! How did he take our news?”

  “Not badly. In fact, very well. That’s why I was calling, but now I know you’re coming over, I’ll save the full details for when we meet. But you needn’t worry, darling. He accepts the idea of the marriage and he’s demonstrated that he has no intention of making himself unpleasant.”

  “Pragmatic as ever! My God, Cornelius is a smart guy!”

  There was a pause.

  “Vicky? Are you still there?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Oh, yes, I’m here. Darling, I won’t keep you from your work. I’ll talk to you again soon.”

  He told me he loved me and hung up.

  I went on sitting by the silent phone.

  V

  “Daddy, I’m sorry to call you at the office, but I thought you’d want to know that I’ve decided to take your advice about the trial marriage and postpone the wedding until my birthday on Christmas Eve. After eloping to Maryland with Sam and Reno with Sebastian, I decided it was about time I had a normal family wedding in New York—no circus, nothing grand, just a low-key family occasion with all the children present.”

  All my father said was, “I’m glad. I’m sure you’re doing the right thing. Thank you, Vicky. … Have you told Scott?”

  “I’m waiting till he comes to New York.”

  “I hope he doesn’t get angry and accuse me of manipulating you.”

  “Don’t be silly, Daddy, Scott knows I have a mind of my own.”

  VI

  Two weeks later I was with Scott at the Carlyle. It was early evening. His plane had arrived on time, and after meeting him at the airport I had driven to the hotel in my car, not the station wagon I used for ferrying the children around, but the little British sports car which I so seldom had the chance to use. Scott, a nervous passenger, had emerged wan but unscathed at the journey’s end.

  “Do you want to rest for a while?” I asked anxiously, but he made a rapid recovery and invited me up to his suite.

  Later, much later, he stretched himself luxuriously beside me oh the bed and exclaimed with a new burst of energy, “Let’s go out and have a celebration drink!”

  “Okay.” I was propped up on one elbow as I dreamily smoked a cigarette and watched the light glint on the silver in his sideburns. As he put his hands behind his head, I feasted my eyes on the lines of his shoulders and ribs, and reaching forward, I trailed my index finger lightly from his mouth to his navel and from his navel to the taut muscles of his thighs.

  “Where would you like to go to celebrate?” I said.

  “Let’s take a few more minutes to think about that,” he said, smiling at me with hot sleepy black eyes, and drew me back to him for another kiss.

  I noticed the thickness of the hair at the nape of his neck as I caught it between my fingers, and I was again aware of the roughness of his cheek, which betrayed how much time had elapsed since his morning shave in London. His sideburns, seen at close range, weren’t slim and trim but shaggy and thick, the hairs a complex mixture of black and silver. His teeth, unstained by nicotine, were very white; I always forgot unless I looked closely at his mouth that they weren’t quite even, the eyeteeth being a fraction out of alignment. His mouth, sensual when relaxed, was normally hard and obstinate, his full lower lip held in check by the thin upper lip’s unyielding pressure. Fine lines marked the corners of his eyes and hinted at past suffering harshly suppressed. It was a strong face but not a happy one.

  He started to make love. His intense concentration should have seemed unpleasantly self-absorbed, but I always found it hypnotically exciting, although I was unsure why I should have been so consistently mesmerized. Part of his success could probably be attributed to his looks, but not all; it’s an unfortunate fact of life that strikingly attractive men aren’t necessarily mesmerizing in bed. Perhaps the truth lay closer to the fact that I wanted to be mesmerized and knew Scott could achieve this triumph of making me relax completely. With him I knew there would be no awkwardness which might reduce the scene to an embarrassing mess, and so his smooth, accomplished, apparently indestructible competence, which might well have chilled many women, was exactly what I needed to help me overcome my terror of making a false move and blighting the encounter by my inadequacy. I put my trust in this machinelike control time after time and was never disappointed, yet in the final analysis it wasn’t this mercifully impersonal competence which I found so erotic; it was the powerful release of all his pent-up emotions, the opening of that closed, unreadable, infinitely mysterious mind.

  “Come on, Mr. Mystery Man,” I said. “Let’s go out and have that drink.”

  “Why am I so mysterious?”

  “You’re so different. If we were characters in a science-fiction movie, you’d be the alien in human guise.”

  “If we were characters in a science-fiction movie, I strongly suspect I’d be the only human and everyone else would be aliens disguised as robots!”

  We laughed, dressed, and made our leisurely way downstairs.

  “I’m beginning to feel like a tourist in this city,” said Scott, hailing a cab outside the hotel, “so let’s pretend
to be tourists at Beekman Tower and watch the sun set behind the Manhattan skyline.”

  “Lovely, but we don’t need a cab, do we? What’s wrong with my sports car?”

  “Please! I don’t want to start the evening drinking brandy to revive me!” he said, and we laughed and tumbled into the cab and spent the journey crosstown kissing in the backseat like a couple of teenagers while the driver watched us in the mirror with a jaundiced eye.

  High above First Avenue in the cocktail lounge at the top of the Beekman Tower, we found a table by one of the windows which faced west to the shining towers of Manhattan, already silhouetted against an impossibly crimson sky.

  “The lady’ll have a martini, straight up, with an olive,” said Scott to the waiter, “and I’ll have …” He paused as his mind roamed among the vast choices available. Then: “Give me vodka,” he said, “on the rocks with a lemon twist. And make that a double.” He saw me looking at him and added with a smile, “I’ve got to have something to wake me up! It’s almost midnight by European time, and I’ve had a busy day.”

  “I don’t know how you’re in such good shape. That westward flight across the Atlantic’s a real killer.” I was about to say something else when I glimpsed a dark young man sitting at a table nearby. He was with a glamorous brunette who in the old days would have worked in Hollywood but who was now more likely to be earning a living in a New York recording studio. “Good heavens!” I exclaimed, surprised. “There’s Donald Shine.”

  Scott swiveled in his chair, but the young man didn’t see us. He was too busy listening to his companion.

  “You never told me you knew Donald Shine!”

  “Didn’t I? I met him at a party Jake gave about two years ago. It was just after Shine had taken over that data-processing company.”

  Scott smiled wryly, “He’s come a long way since then.”

  This was undeniable. Donald Shine had just taken over Stamford-Hartford Reliance, one of the biggest and oldest insurance corporations in the country, and afterward announced that his company was in future to be known as Shine & General, a conglomerate specializing in financial services. Wall Street was now watching him with the fearful fascination of a bunch of elderly rabbits cornered by a hungry young cobra.

  “Your father nearly had apoplexy when Stam-Hart Reliance fell to Shine,” said Scott as the waiter arrived with our drinks. “I had him on the phone for a full hour talking about the horrors of a kid from Brooklyn giving orders to middle-aged, white Anglo-Saxon Protestant, Ivy League elder statesmen. The incident gave him a magnificent opportunity to sound off on all the evils afflicting the country, and you know what your father’s like when he gets going on draft dodgers, black anarchists, and teenage drug addicts. … Incidentally, since we’re talking of your father, tell me how he reacted to the news of our engagement. I was relieved he’d decided not to be openly hostile.”

  “Yes. … You may find this hard to believe, but he even came up with some sensible advice. At least I thought it was sensible. I hope you will too.”

  “Did he ask you to postpone the wedding?”

  I was startled. “Yes, he did.”

  “My God, don’t tell me you gave in to him!”

  “I wouldn’t put it that way,” I said. I could feel my face becoming hot. “There are several advantages to marrying at Christmas. I thought—”

  “In other words, to cut a long story short, Cornelius has manipulated you into postponing your commitment to me.” He knocked back his drink and flagged down the nearest waiter. “Another double vodka.”

  “That’s untrue and unfair.” I felt very upset. “Quite apart from the fact that I’d like a quiet family wedding in New York when you’re finally through with Europe, I think we owe it to ourselves to try a real affair instead of these unreal jet-set interludes! I want to marry you more than anything else in the world, but I don’t want you turning around later and accusing me of pressuring you into marriage while we were still strangers!”

  “Strangers!”

  “Yes, strangers! We’ve had one week in New York in 1963. We’ve had one long weekend in London earlier this year, and now we’ll have a few more days in New York. Well, that’s wonderful, that’s exciting, that’s glamorous, but it’s so far removed from normal married life that it could be a mating practice on another planet! My father wants us to live together in London this summer and try to create a relationship which bears more of a resemblance to marriage. A trial marriage can never be exactly the same as a real marriage, but at least afterward we may have more idea than we have now about what our marriage is going to be like. I’m sorry, but I think my father’s right. It’s got nothing to do with manipulation. It’s my own independent decision.”

  “Your father’s playing for time. He’s betting on you tiring of me and breaking the engagement—or maybe just postponing it into the new year when he’ll have a chance to fire me—”

  “Oh, I get so tired of this paranoid suspicion you two men display toward each other! Scott, you can relax. Daddy’s given me his word he’ll never fire you, and I believe him. He’d never do anything that would permanently alienate me.”

  “Where the bank’s concerned,” said Scott, “there’s nothing Cornelius wouldn’t do. Okay, what else did he promise you?”

  I looked blank. “What do you mean?”

  “You know what I mean! If Cornelius promised he’d never fire me, that means you must have discussed my future at Van Zale’s. When’s he going to retire and name me as his successor?”

  “I … I didn’t like to ask him about that.”

  “Ah, come on, Vicky! Don’t hand me that kind of crap! You asked and he told you!”

  “No, for me it was enough to know he had no intention of firing you.”

  “You don’t really think I’m going to believe that, do you? Why are you lying to me like this? Whose side are you on here, for Christ’s sake?”

  The waiter arrived with another double vodka.

  “Scott,” I said, “if you’re going to lose your temper and talk to me like this, you’ll only succeed in strengthening my conviction that we should have a trial marriage. And please—is it necessary to drink so fast and so heavily? You’ve always told me that kind of drinking never suited you.”

  He picked up his glass and again drank all the vodka straight off.

  I stood up. “I’d like to go now, please.”

  He said nothing. He was looking down at his empty glass with a surprised, shocked expression, as if he had found himself in an unpleasant position but had no memory of how he had arrived there. Then he set down the glass carefully, rested his hands on the table as if to steady himself, and said with a humility that moved me because it was so obviously genuine: “I’m sorry. Forgive me. That was a very stupid thing to do.”

  I sat down, but during the silence which followed, I was aware that my movements had attracted the attention of Donald Shine. I did not look directly at him, but out of the corner of my eye I could see him turning to stare at our table.

  “I can think of only one reason why you should be so reluctant to tell me what your father said,” Scott was saying evenly. “He must have decided to cut me out. He won’t fire me—he’ll keep me in the firm in order to maintain good relations with you, but he’ll see I’m railroaded to some place where I can’t bother him. Where did he suggest? Europe again? No, he’d never be content to see you disappear for a second time into Europe—always assuming, of course, that his luck deserts him and he fails to stop our marriage. Boston? No, too near. He’d never be able to sleep at night if he knew I was only an hour away on the LaGuardia shuttle. How about California? Banking’s booming on the West Coast, and he knows you’ve always admired San Francisco—”

  “Well, look who’s here!”

  We both jumped as the long shadow fell across our table.

  It was Donald Shine.

  “Scott Sullivan! Hey, how are you doing? Great to see you! Are you still battling the British, or are you bac
k in town for keeps?” He turned to me with his broadest smile, his extraordinary exuberance wrapping itself around me as if he could strong-arm me into liking him. “Hi, beautiful. I forget your name, but I remember you—once seen, never forgotten! You’re Cornelius Van Zale’s daughter.”

  “Vicky Foxworth. Hello, Mr. Shine.”

  “Congratulations, Don!” said Scott, smiling at him.

  “For what? Oh, that old insurance racket up in Connecticut! Yeah, they’re still picking up the shit I knocked out of them, but hell, that’s all past history now, and who’s interested in the past? This is the Now generation! Hey, Scott, are you in the city for long? Let me buy you lunch tomorrow!” He turned to me, his long hair flopping engagingly over his ears as he gave me another of his broadest smiles. “You may not know this,” he said, “but I’ve got a soft spot for this guy here. He was the one who gave me my first big break when I was just a kid in jeans and sneakers.” Laughing at the memory, he swung back to Scott. “How about it, pal? Twelve-thirty tomorrow at Twenty-One—come on, say yes!”

  Scott looked up at him for a long moment. I saw his fingers tighten around his empty glass of vodka. Then suddenly he laughed too and said carelessly, “Sure, why not? Thanks.”

  “Great! Seeya!” He paused long enough to wink at me. “ ’Bye, beautiful.”

  He was gone, and suddenly, miraculously, so was our tension. We looked at each other and tried to stifle our mirth.

  “Isn’t he awful!” I whispered.

  “Don’t be such a snob! Personally I’ve always liked Donald Shine. I admire anyone who can go after what he wants with such single-mindedness!”

  “Yes, he goes after what he wants, all right—with the restraint of a pack of wolves and the delicacy of a tank on maneuvers! Maybe I’m getting conservative in my old age, but for once I agree with Daddy—I don’t like Donald Shine converting Wall Street into a hip playground for the Now generation. … Oh, God, why did I have to mention Daddy again? Scott—”