Sins of the Fathers

by Susan Howatch

  I stared at the top of the desk. Presently I realized I was looking for something, although what that something was, I didn’t know. There were some letters under a glass paperweight, a photograph of Alicia, a photograph of me, a leather desk set, two slim files, and an unexpectedly large silver cigarette box. My father never kept cigarettes for guests, never encouraged smoking in his presence.

  Reaching forward, I raised the lid.

  “Oh, God,” I said, and in the box the spools of the exquisite little tape recorder revolved automatically at the sound of my voice.

  I had found my father’s latest toy.

  I fidgeted with it clumsily for a time, but at last the tape was rewound and I had discovered how to play it back. I pushed the button. The performance began.

  For two minutes I listened to a one-sided phone conversation between my father and Harry Morton, but seconds after this ended a woman’s voice said over the intercom, “Mr. Sullivan’s here to see you, Mr. Van Zale.”

  “Show him in.”

  Another pause. The door opened. Scott’s voice said pleasantly, “Cornelius! Good to see you again!”

  I waited, holding my breath, but all I heard was a silence broken only by Scott saying abruptly, “Well, if you won’t talk and won’t shake hands, perhaps I should ask for an explanation.”

  My father did speak then. He said as dispassionately as a chess player winding up a difficult game with all his most consummate skill: “Let me first fix you a drink.”

  IV

  I listened, a blind witness to carnage, while the little spools turned around and around in that shining box. The world was reduced to a desktop and the voices that after a while I failed to recognize because it seemed they could have no connection with the two people I loved. I told myself I was listening to a conversation between strangers; I told myself I was hallucinating, acting out the nightmares which had seized control of my subconscious mind; I told myself I was someone else in some other place and that eventually I would emerge from the world of illusion and be reclaimed once more by the world of reality.

  But all the while I told myself these frantic lies, I knew that the revolving spools were reality and that I was right there watching them as they spun all my dreams far out of sight into oblivion.

  “You’ve just wasted your entire life, Scott. You’ve ended up as big a failure as your father. And the greatest irony of all is that for years and years I wanted you to have the bank. In fact, although you didn’t know it, you’d dedicated yourself to giving me what I wanted most.”

  “No!” I screamed. “Don’t tell him that! Never, never tell him!”

  But the spools never stopped for one instant, and my father’s voice went on.

  “But it wasn’t enough for you to get the bank, was it? You’re so mentally sick that nothing less than the destruction of everything I cared about would satisfy you, so you started messing around with my daughter and dividing me from the people I loved.”

  “No!” I sobbed. “No, no, no!”

  “No!” shouted Scott. “It wasn’t like that! You’re the one who’s sick, twisting everything around like this and making out I don’t love Vicky!”

  “Well, you can forget about Vicky now! She’s through with you. She told me so herself. As soon as she heard the truth from Jake back in September, she saw at once how you were using her to guarantee your future!”

  “That’s a lie!”

  “Is it? I tell you, she wanted to break off with you right then and there, but I persuaded her to hold on until I’d taken care of Shine. She didn’t want to do it—she’s scared of you. She’s been scared of you for some time—haven’t you noticed how tense and nervous she’s become? She didn’t even want to see you today, but I gave her my word I’d send for you as soon as you arrived at the hotel. I didn’t want to run the risk of you harming her.”

  “But I’d never harm Vicky, never!”

  “My God, you’ve got a hell of a nerve to say that—and to think you accuse me of lying! You must be even sicker than I thought!”

  “I swear to you I’d never hurt Vicky!”

  “Don’t give me that crap. You wanted to kill her back in August.”

  I thought dimly: Kevin betrayed me. In the end, like Jake, he found his first loyalty was to that alliance formed years before I was born.

  “She told me all about it. You tried to beat her up. You threatened to kill her. She never got over that, never, and she never will, but she was too frightened of you to break the engagement off right away. It was only when she got back to New York and learned the whole truth about your activities with Shine that she realized just how far she’d been used and abused!”

  “You’re lying to me, you’re lying to me just as you once lied to me about my father!”

  “You know I’m not. You know it’s the truth. You just can’t face up to it, that’s all. You’re too sick. You ought to be locked up. The very least I can do is make sure you never get another job in banking, and the very least I can do is stop you from terrorizing my daughter. I’m going to see all Wall Street knows about the way you double-crossed me with Donald Shine, and I’ve already got security guards keeping a twenty-four-hour watch on my family. You make one move—just one—to see Vicky again, and I’ll see you nailed on an assault rap, and don’t tell me I can’t do it, because we both know damned well I can. You’re finished. Got it? I don’t want to know you, Vicky doesn’t want to know you, nobody wants to know you anymore. You’ve failed. You’re through. Now, get out of here and go somewhere a long way away and live with those truths—if you can. From now on I don’t care what happens to you, because I never want to see you again. It’s over. It’s finished. I have nothing else to say.”

  I switched off the tape recorder. I said aloud, “I can’t listen to such wickedness,” but I was still speaking when I turned the recorder back on again. “I can’t listen,” I said. “I can’t.” But there was my father, talking with such poisonous credibility as he laid waste the life that was so precious to me, and there was Scott, shouting abuse until the room echoed with his disjointed sentences, and then my father’s bodyguards entered the room and there was a scuffle and someone, surely not Scott, but someone very ill, was threatening violence, and my father said, “Make one more threat like that in front of witnesses and you’ll be in the psychiatric block of the nearest jail before sunset tonight,” and then, as Scott began to shout obscenities again, I switched off the recorder. But this time I didn’t switch it back on. I looked at the little spools dumbly for a long time. Then I rewound the tape, removed it from the recorder, and slipped it into my purse. I was dry-eyed by that time, and my hands were steady.

  I left the room. I walked the whole length of the great hall without looking either to right or left, and when the doorman in the front lobby offered to find me a cab, I said, “Yes. Thank you, that would be nice,” as if I were on my way to some social engagement.

  Halfway uptown I almost asked the driver to stop at a pay phone, but I knew there was no point in calling the Carlyle again. Scott obviously wasn’t answering the phone.

  At the hotel I paid the driver and crossed the lobby to the elevators. I began to feel as if I were moving in a dream; the world looked bright but far away, as if seen through the wrong end of a telescope, and I could no longer hear what people were saying.

  With my hand still steady I used my key to unlock the door of the suite, and walked in. There was, of course, a note. I believe there always is in such cases. The note said: “My darling Vicky: Believe nothing your father tells you. I shouldn’t have involved myself with Shine, but I knew your father had become determined to cheat me out of what was justly mine, and Shine was my last chance to achieve that peace of mind which I’ve wanted so much for so long.

  “However, I know now that there’s no justice and no peace. I shall never make amends to my father for what I did to him, just as I shall never make amends to you for leading you to believe I could ever bring you the happiness you
deserve. I realize now we were deceiving ourselves when we thought we could have a successful marriage. I’m unworthy of you, not fit to live. The violence just won’t let me be.

  “I’ve managed to go on all these years because I’ve turned the violence outward. By channeling it into my ambition, I was able to live with myself, but since my ambitions have been annihilated, I no longer have an outlet for the violence, so the violence has nowhere else to turn except inward upon myself. But perhaps after all, this is what I’ve always wanted. Sometimes the worst that can happen to a man isn’t to die. It’s to live with the consequences of what he’s done—or what he’s failed to do.

  “I love you so much I can’t quite believe you don’t still love me, but if you don’t love me anymore, please forgive me for all the pain and unhappiness I’ve brought you, and please believe me when I say that I’m going into the dark thinking of you and thanking you for all those wonderful sunlit hours we shared together. My love always, Scott.”

  I went into the bathroom and knelt down by the bloodred water. His body was still warm but he was quite dead. I laid my cheek against his for a long while, and as I stroked his hair I saw Kennedy dying in Dallas and Jackie’s dress stained with blood, and the soiled mud of Vietnam, and the burning cities of America—I saw all those random images of violence blend to form the background of our affair, and then it seemed to me that Scott and I were no longer in the center of the stage but were dissolving in the blood which was gushing from the scenery to engulf us; it was as if the violence had moved to the center of the stage to dominate and destroy our lives.

  I said aloud, “I must take him somewhere very peaceful,” and suddenly I craved for peace and for an end to violence’s intolerable suffering. I felt I had to get away, far, far away; I felt I had to make a new beginning, but that longing seemed so unattainable and conjured up yet another world seen through the wrong end of a telescope, and I didn’t know how I was ever going to get there. I just went on kneeling by the bloodstained water and stroking his dark hair until at last I said, “I must do something now,” and I went back into the living room. Then it occurred to me that I didn’t want anyone interrupting us, so I put the “DO NOT DISTURB” notice on the outside of the door. After that there didn’t seem to be anything else to do, so I sat down on the couch.

  I sat there for some time. Outside, it began to get dark. I wondered if I should call the police, but I knew I couldn’t talk to anyone. Normally I would have turned to my father, but of course I couldn’t turn to my father, not anymore.

  When it was dark, I switched on the light and moved toward the bathroom to sit with him again, but when I reached the bathroom door I found myself unable to open it. I heard my voice say, “Scott’s dead,” and suddenly I glimpsed myself in the long mirror, a woman in a blue coat, a woman a long way away in some private hell where no one could reach her, a woman suspended in time, impaled on the past, paralyzed by the present, unable to conceive of the future.

  “Scott’s dead,” I said. “Dead.” I remembered then that dead people had to have funerals, and I was glad when I remembered that, because I knew at once where I would have to take him. I wondered how I could arrange for the body to be transported to England. Probably it would all be very complicated. I decided I had to get help immediately, and once I’d made that decision, I felt much better, because I realized how sensible I was being. Moving to the phone, I asked for the international operator and placed a call to Sebastian’s little house in Cambridge.

  V

  Sebastian picked up the receiver on the second ring.

  “Oh, hi,” I said. “It’s me. Look, I’m sorry to bother you, but Scott’s dead—he’s committed suicide—and I’m not sure what to do. I’m here with him now, and I just can’t quite figure out how I’m going to cut through all the red tape in order to take him to Mallingham. What do you think I should do next? I can’t ask my father. You do understand that, don’t you, Sebastian? I can’t ask my father.”

  “Wait.”

  I waited obediently.

  “Okay, let’s take this one step at a time. Are you sure he’s dead?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Have you called the police?”

  “No, not yet.”

  “Where are you?”

  “In Scott’s suite at the Carlyle.”

  “Right. Now, here’s what you do. Pick up your purse and anything else that belongs to you, but leave your key to the suite on the dresser in the bedroom. Got that? Okay, do it and come back to me.”

  I did as I was told.

  “Great,” said Sebastian when I returned to the phone. “Now, leave the hotel as casually as possible and walk home. Don’t take a cab. The object of these instructions, as you may realize, is to leave no obvious trace of yourself at the Carlyle. If you can do that then the police will be more likely to begin their inquiries at Willow and Wall, and then your father will be able to take care of them before they can bother you.”

  “I see. Yes.”

  “Now, when you get home, look in the Yellow Pages under the entry ‘Security’ and hire two guards to sit outside your front door for the next thirty-six hours to keep everyone out. Insist that no one is to cross your threshold except your kids and staff. I’ll call you as soon as I arrive. If I get the morning flight out of London, I’ll be with you around four o’clock tomorrow afternoon. Have you got all that? Do you want me to repeat anything?”

  “No, that’s fine.”

  “One last thing: was there any blood?”

  “Oh, yes,” I said, surprised. “He cut his wrists. The bathwater’s bright red.”

  There was a pause before Sebastian said, “Right. I get it. Yes. Okay, before you leave the suite, just check that you have no blood on your clothing. We don’t want people noticing you on the way out.”

  “It’s all right. The blood’s all in the bath.”

  “Yes … I guess it would be. Vicky, when you get home, will you please call a doctor and get yourself treated for shock?”

  “I’m okay, Sebastian. I feel much better now that I know what to do. All I needed was a little advice.”

  “Uh-huh. But call a doctor anyway, would you? Just as a favor to me?”

  “Sure, if you like.”

  “Thanks. Remember, I’ll be with you as soon as I can. Just try to hold on till I get there.”

  “No problem. Don’t worry about me,” I said, and only just managed to replace the receiver before I blacked out.

  VI

  I was unconscious for only a short time, but when I recovered I felt so ill that I thought at first I would be unable to leave the hotel. But I did. Following Sebastian’s instructions, I went home, summoned a doctor, hired two security guards, and took myself off to bed. I told the children I suspected I was coming down with flu, and later I explained the guards’ presence by saying I’d received a threat that someone intended to steal my jewelry. The telephone rang repeatedly, but I insisted I was too ill to speak to anyone.

  When the doctor arrived, he prescribed a sedative, but I slept only briefly. Sometime during the night I vomited, but I didn’t mind that because afterward I felt less ill. I drank a little water but could eat nothing.

  The next morning the telephone continued ringing at regular intervals, and once I heard voices raised in the hall as someone tried to gain admittance to the apartment, but the security guards knew their business, and nobody disturbed me.

  The police never came, but the letters did, letter after letter slipping under the front door into the hall. My father always dictated letters, which his secretaries typed, but these letters were handwritten. He had small neat handwriting which he wrote in straight well-spaced lines. There were no erasures. I wondered if he had sat up all night drafting and redrafting what he wanted to say.

  “My darling Vicky: On failing to find you at the bank after our phone conversation, I went to the Carlyle to see if you were with Scott, but there was no reply from the suite. I then went home, but I
was so worried when I still had no success in contacting either of you that I returned to the Carlyle and insisted that the manager open the door of the suite for me. What I found there was the most terrible shock, and since you’re refusing to see me, I can only assume you not only know what has happened but somehow hold me partially to blame. Sweetheart, this is an appalling tragedy and one which I never for one moment anticipated—you mustn’t, please, hold me in any way responsible. I promise you that I can explain everything if you’ll just give me the chance. Meanwhile, don’t worry about the police or the inquiries. I’ll take care of everything, but please let me see you. All my love, Daddy.”

  “My dearest Vicky: Since you still refuse to see me, perhaps it would help if I set out the facts as plainly and unemotionally as possible, so that you can judge me on what actually happened and not on what you think might have happened between Scott and myself.

  “As you know, I was devoted to Scott and it was a terrible shock to me back in November 1963 when I had to face up to the truth I should have acknowledged long before: that the devotion was in no way reciprocated and that he was out to extract the widest possible revenge for his father’s death. I knew then that I should have to fire him as soon as I was free to do so, but of course Scott knew this too and so he resolved to outmaneuver me once and for all during the four-year reprieve he had engineered for himself in London.

  “His plan involved you, since it was obvious that if he used you correctly my hands would again be tied when he returned to New York. I know it was your mother’s accident which led to the revival of your affair, but you can be sure that even if your mother hadn’t been ill Scott would have engineered a reconciliation by some other means. I’m not claiming he was entirely insincere. You’re a charming and attractive woman and I’m sure he derived genuine pleasure from your company, but when he agreed to marry you I’m afraid he was motivated primarily by his ambition, which by this time could only be described as a dangerous obsession.