Sins of the Fathers

by Susan Howatch

  “Lovely, Daddy. Listen …”

  “—but now all I have to do is instruct my secretary to make sure there’s always a tape in the machine. Then even I can forget the interview’s being recorded! There’ll be no knobs to switch on, no buttons to press, no … Sorry, were you trying to say something?”

  I told him what Jake had said.

  We were in the library of my father’s apartment, and beyond the windows the sun was setting behind the trees of Central Park. My father’s new tape recorder lay on the coffee table alongside a copy of The Economist. The astronaut chessmen faced one another expectantly on the table by the steel bookstands, and beyond them above the television was the latest painting my father had acquired, a ketchup bottle by Andy Warhol.

  My father had been stooping over his tape recorder, but as I spoke he straightened his back and looked out at the long sunset. His face was almost hidden from me, and the light, streaming through the windows behind him, made it still harder to see his expression.

  “You’ll call him, won’t you, Daddy?” I said, putting Jake’s number by the phone. “Please!”

  He picked up the slip of paper, but I knew he was looking not at the numbers but at the tennis court at Bar Harbor and the four boys who had played and laughed together there long ago beneath cloudless summer skies.

  Without a word he picked up the receiver and started to dial …

  “Mr. Reischman, please. This is Cornelius Van Zale.”

  He had seated himself behind his desk, and as he waited, he picked up one of his silver ball-point pens and drew a pattern on the blotter. I had just realized that the series of rectangles formed a tennis court when he began to speak.

  “Jake? Vicky gave me the message.”

  There was a long silence while Jake talked. My hand fidgeted with one of the pawns, but all the while I was watching my father, and as I watched, he slowly laid down his pen and turned his swivel chair away from me to face the window.

  At last he said, “I see. Yes. Thank you.” And after another silence: “I’m sorry to hear that. You must tell me if there’s anything I can do.” And finally: “Yes, I’ll take care of it. Thank you again.”

  Swiveling the chair slowly back to face the desk, he replaced the receiver. His features were grave and somehow pure, as if they belonged to a statue whose sculptured features were incapable of expression. His fine eyes were a clear empty gray.

  “Is he dying?” I heard myself ask.

  “Yes. There’s a fifty-percent chance he may die on the operating table tomorrow. If he survives, he’ll have a year. Cancer. Someone said only the other day how thin he’d become.”

  I thought of the Uncle Jake I had known long ago, and felt the lump form in my throat.

  We said nothing for a time. My father went on sitting at his desk and looking at the tennis court he had drawn on the blotter. I went on sitting in my chair and watching him. Finally I said, “Daddy, what went wrong between you and Jake?”

  “It doesn’t matter anymore.”

  The minutes slipped away, and still he didn’t move. Eventually, as I began to recover, I realized he was still in shock.

  “What was the business matter he wanted to discuss with you?”

  My father was bone white. As he slowly swiveled his chair to face the window again, I noticed that the long sunset was over and darkness was falling at last on the city.

  “Nothing,” said my father. “Vicky, you’ll excuse me, but I’m going to have to take a rain check on our game of chess.”

  “Of course.” I was moved that he should have been so affected by the news of Jake’s illness, and crossing the room, I stooped to kiss the top of his head as he sat in his chair. “Shall I stay longer so that we can just talk? Or would you rather be alone?”

  “I have to be alone,” he said. “I’ve got to think.”

  “Sure. Good night, then, Daddy,” I said, giving him another kiss, and left him alone with his thoughts in the steadily darkening room.

  III

  Jake survived his operation but for the first three days was allowed no visitors except the members of his immediate family. I heard that his elder daughter, Ruth, twice divorced and now living in Europe, flew to New York and visited him with Elsa, but Jake’s son David, a California dropout, couldn’t be traced, and his ex-wife Amy remained in Florida. When the ban on visitors was lifted, I felt reluctant to go to the hospital in case I met Elsa, but after a week of dithering I bought a small spray of flowers and ventured into the reception hall of Mount Sinai.

  “I was wondering if I could see Mr. Jacob Reischman for a few minutes,” I said after I’d been referred to the nurse in charge of the appropriate floor.

  In the brief silence that followed, I noticed that she had blue eyes, finely lined at the corners, and soft dark hair beneath her cap. Then she said in a kind voice, “I’m sorry, but I must give you some bad news. Mr. Reischman had a relapse this morning and died half an hour ago. Would you be a member of the family?”

  I said, “No.” And then, “Yes. In a way. Excuse me.” And turning away, I walked quickly down the corridor, avoided the elevators, and ran down the stairs to the lobby.

  IV

  Alicia greeted me in the hall of my father’s apartment. As usual she was dressed, not dowdily, for her clothes were exquisitely cut, but dully, in a plain dark blue skirt and jacket with a white blouse and no jewelry. A small dark blue hat partially covered the dyed brown sweep of her hair.

  “Hello, dear,” she said. “I was just going out to lunch. Why, how very pale you look! Is anything the matter?”

  “Oh, Alicia!” I said, the words tumbling out of my mouth. “I feel so sad. I’ve just been to the hospital, and they told me Jake died this morning. I don’t know why I should feel so sad when I’ve seen little of him recently, but somehow he seemed to stand for the past—for something that’s now gone for ever …”

  I stopped. It was the expression in her eyes. Her face remained still, her features composed in the passionless mask which had always alienated me, but her eyes were brilliant with memory, and I knew then, even before she spoke, that she had loved him.

  V

  “Of course I never considered leaving your father,” she said. “I’ve always loved him more than anyone else. But we’ve had our difficult times.”

  We were sitting by the window of her bedroom on the uncomfortable chaise longue which Alicia had for some reason cherished for years. Alicia was smoking a cigarette. The pitcher of martinis before us on the table was empty, but our glasses were still full.

  “… so you see what a mess it was,” said this extraordinary woman I had never known. “It irritates me so much nowadays when adultery is depicted as if it were no more than an innocent date between teenagers. It’s the fashion now, I know, to condemn hypocrisy, but all I can say is we’re living in very dishonest times. We’re not mechanical dolls programmed to copulate without emotion at the drop of a hat, and to pretend that we are—as most young people seem to today—strikes me as being not only dangerous but pitifully naive. How ironic that the chic word today is ‘cool’! To dabble in other people’s emotions isn’t cool. It’s lighting a fire and stepping into the flames.”

  There was a pause while she stubbed out her cigarette and I offered her another.

  “Well, we all got burned,” she said when the cigarette was alight, “but after Sam died, things got better. Cornelius gave up Teresa and I’d already given up Jake. I suspect Teresa was glad to go, but Jake … He wasn’t the sort of man who quits easily. He approached me again after Sebastian was fired and matters were at a low ebb once more between myself and Cornelius, but of course there was no question of me resuming the affair, because by then I knew that Cornelius and I were capable of recapturing our past happiness no matter how deeply we might be estranged. We’d proved that after Sam died, and I thought that if only I waited long enough, we would prove it again.”

  “And did you?”

  “No. I doubt if we ev
er will now. I’ve been waiting in vain … But don’t misunderstand! We may not be close, but we don’t quarrel and we’re fond of each other, and that’s more than most couples can say after thirty-six years of marriage. I’m content. I have my sons and my grandchildren, my health and my looks. On the whole, life’s been very kind to me. It’s only on days like today, when life seems so greatly diminished, that I want to cry for the past and the way life might have been.”

  “Alicia, I do wish we could have talked before.”

  “There was never anything to say. Our lives were like two parallel lines which never met. But I’m glad I’ve talked to you about Jake. I’ve wanted to talk to someone about him for years, but there was never anyone to tell.” She looked over her shoulder at the silent phone. “I wonder if I should call your father. No, let him hear the news from someone else. It’s better that way.”

  After a pause I said, “I’ll call him,” and began dialing the number of the bank at Willow and Wall.

  VI

  On the twenty-second of November, just a month after fifty thousand antiwar demonstrators had marched on Washington, the United States Army captured Hill 875 near Dak To after one of the bloodiest battles of the war in Vietnam, and the blood seemed to stream through my own living room as I watched the television news. That evening I wrote to Sebastian: “There’s got to be an end to such pointless waste of life. Someone’s just got to draw the line,” but no one drew the line, so life went on with the daily body counts of the dead and the shattered, the daily promises of President Johnson to deliver his Great Society, the daily reminders of divisiveness and death. And as the drumbeat of violence rose in a steady crescendo, I was acutely aware of the accompanying music of the times shifting key as the songwriters moved away from innocent love songs and began instead to glamorize the increasingly fashionable drug scene.

  “I draw the line at that kind of song,” I said after I had been forced to listen to a certain hit record from beginning to end.

  “Oh, Mom!”

  “You can shriek all you like, but I’m not going to be soft and dishonest and pretend I think it’s the greatest. You don’t want me to be a hypocrite, do you?”

  “But, Mom, you just don’t know where it’s at!”

  “I know exactly where it’s at. It’s at the point where I draw the line and say this mindless retreat into passive drug-ridden introspection is just as sick as this mindless escalation of violence at home and overseas. God, I sometimes wonder how we’ll survive this decadent disastrous decade!” I exclaimed passionately, and then realized with a shock that I was echoing the words Jake had used to reject a once-cherished culture which was now cracking apart at the seams.

  “I’m sorry,” I said to my children, “I don’t mean to sound so hopelessly square, but try to see things for a moment from my point of view. It’s hard for someone like me, who can remember better times, to stand by with a smile while the country undergoes this peculiarly unpleasant nervous breakdown. It’s not easy to live through a national trauma without feeling rattled as all the old familiar landmarks of custom and behavior fall by the wayside, but perhaps the landmarks are still there after all, perhaps it’s only on the surface that things have changed, perhaps young people today are in fact much as they’ve always been …”

  “What’s she talking about?”

  “She’s trying to tell us our generation’s nothing unusual. What an insult! Everyone knows we’re the unique product of the H-bomb and the postindustrial society—everyone knows there’s never been a generation like us before in the whole history of mankind!”

  “Mom knows all that—she’s trying to be nice to us! Stop being so mean to her!”

  “I’m not being mean to her! All I’m saying is that it’s impossible for someone as old as she is to realize just how unique we are.”

  “Stop talking about me as if I’m senile!” I shouted. “And stop being so goddamned arrogant! You’re right—this generation is unique! It’s the first one insensitive enough to think good manners are unimportant!”

  “Cool it, Mom. We don’t mind you being old. We love you anyway.”

  “Those kids are driving me nuts,” I said to my father that night as we sat down to play chess. “The whole younger generation’s driving me nuts. Whenever I see anyone under twenty-five nowadays, I want to scream.”

  “I know how you feel.” My father looked gloomy. “I fired two clerks today for peddling marijuana in the typing pool, but when I told Harry Morton during our lunch together up at the Trust, he just said that a lot of drug-taking was going on in the Wall Street lower echelons. Imagine that! I was shocked, but Harry just shrugged his shoulders and said it was a sign of the times.”

  Harry Morton was the president of the Van Zale Manhattan Trust, Van Zale’s commercial bank, and was fifteen years younger than my father. My father had once tried to foster a romance between us, but men like Harry Morton, twice divorced, totally married to his job, and interested in nothing outside banking but the jet engine of his new private plane, had no appeal for me.

  “Can’t you do something to cheer your father up?” said Harry to me when we met at the end of November at one of my father’s regular dinner parties. “He talks and acts as if the world’s coming to an end!”

  “Maybe it is,” I said dryly, and sure enough, two days later came the first of a series of moves designed to end the world my father had controlled for over thirty years. A major article on the front page of The Wall Street Journal revealed that Donald Shine’s notorious conglomerate Shine & General was planning to take over not another insurance company but Harry Morton’s own Van Zale Manhattan Trust, the vital adjunct to my father’s investment bank at Willow and Wall.

  VII

  “But I don’t understand,” said Eric. He and Paul had by this time returned to Choate after their noisy weekend at home that had left me with such an antipathy toward the younger generation, but as soon as the article had appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Eric phoned me from school. “How can this be a threat to Granddad? Isn’t the Van Zale Manhattan Trust entirely separate from Van Zale’s?”

  “Legally, yes, but in practice, no. In practice it’s as if they were one big bank. The Trust offers the banking services which Van Zale’s used to offer before the Glass-Steagall Banking Act separated commercial and investment banking back in 1933. The two Van Zale banks are the two halves of the former single entity, and if one falls by the wayside, the other will be in trouble.”

  “But Shine could never take over Van Zale’s!” protested Eric, horrified. “Van Zale’s is a partnership still, not a corporation like the Trust! Surely Granddad has the power to exclude Shine indefinitely from Willow and Wall?”

  “If the Trust falls to Donald Shine, Van Zale’s days are numbered. Your grandfather may be able to hold things together till he dies or retires, but after that, Shine will move in. There’ll be pressure to incorporate, the partners will sell out to become members of the new board, and then Shine can put his own man in the president’s chair. That’ll give him an investment bank as well as a commercial bank and an insurance company, and Shine & General will be a conglomerate specializing in a wide range of financial services, just as Shine’s always planned.”

  “But surely … surely Shine’s not going to succeed?”

  “Well, Granddad seemed confident of winning, but I’m beginning to wonder if he’s just putting up a front. Everyone else seems to think it’ll be touch and go.”

  VIII

  “Eric called,” I said to my father, “and sent you his best wishes for the coming fight. How’s it going? What’s your next move?”

  “We’re figuring out a way we can attack Shine & General’s stock and weaken Shine’s artillery.”

  “But aren’t bear raids illegal nowadays?”

  My father gave me a cynical smile. “Of course,” he said.

  By this time I was beginning to have a clearer picture of what was happening. Camouflaging himself by funneling funds
through a New Jersey bank, Donald Shine had embarked in October on a repeat performance of the takeover which had annihilated the Stamford-Hartford Reliance Insurance Corporation. Shine & General had begun to buy huge blocks of shares in the Van Zale Manhattan Trust, but unknown to Donald Shine, word had reached my father of his plans and his supposedly secret purchases had been observed and monitored. Shine and his lieutenants were still putting the finishing touches to their tender—the offer they believed the bank’s stockholders would find irresistible—and were still continuing to buy the necessary shares when my father, acting through Harry Morton, forced Shine into the open by leaking the news to The Wall Street Journal.

  Caught on the wrong foot, Shine made an ambiguous statement which only heightened the publicity, and the day after my father had cynically confirmed to me that “bear raids” were illegal, the stock of Shine & General started to fall.

  “But how are you doing it?” I said, mystified, to my father. “Rumors of a takeover usually send the stock up, not down!”

  “Shine & General’s not as secure as everyone thinks it is. We’ve been secretly investigating it since early September, and it didn’t take us long to find out that it’s top-heavy and overextended. Donald Shine may be a bright boy, but all the information indicates he’s bitten off more than he can chew. Youth,” said my father with a sigh, “is so impetuous.”

  “But I still don’t understand how you can make the stock fall!”

  My father laughed. “It’s a technique known as ‘multiple flogging.’ It’s a new name for the old practice of bear raiding, and it’s impossible for the authorities to detect it.”

  Two days later, disturbed by the publicity and his falling stock, Shine called Harry Morton and asked for a meeting. Paying lip service to the fact that Van Zale’s and the Trust were separate entities, my father stayed away and only listened to the recording of the brief hostile encounter; Morton told Shine that he was an innocent if he thought he could get away with taking over an important commercial bank, but Shine insisted that he was well-intentioned and wanted only to improve the nation’s banking services by making them more democratic.