Sins of the Fathers
Page 85
“Of course he thought originally that through you he could not only force me to retain him in the firm but also ultimately force me to hand over control of the bank. However, I did manage to communicate to him (through you—of course I knew you’d immediately tell him every word I said) that I’d made up my mind that control of the bank would never pass to him. I thought once he knew this he would back away from marrying you, but Scott was determined by this time to divide me not only from my bank but from you as well, and that was when he decided to use Donald Shine to help his plans along. If this scheme had worked, he would have got both you and the bank in the end. He might have had to wait awhile, but his future as the president of a reorganized Van Zale’s within the Shine & General conglomerate would have been guaranteed.
“You were with me that September evening when Jake told me what Shine was planning and how Scott was in it with him up to the hilt. I doubt if I have to remind you how shocked I was and how I had to be alone afterward to recover from such a terrible blow.
“I decided I had to take Shine first. If I’d fired Scott immediately (as I was still entitled to do in view of his behavior—the other partners would without doubt have backed me up), it would have warned Shine that we were on his trail. So I kept Scott in ignorance—and that meant keeping you in ignorance too. I was sure you were just an innocent pawn in Scott’s game, but I also had to allow for the possibility that you had sided with Scott and were secretly fighting with him against me. A woman in love can be capable of anything, and her judgment in such circumstances can lead her very far astray.
“Once I was rid of Shine I knew I had to keep Scott in ignorance until our final confrontation—he might have done too much damage otherwise, so I had Harry go through the motions of a full inquiry at the Trust and went on pretending no one knew who’d betrayed us to Shine. I can admit to you frankly that I was scared of Scott by this time. Obviously he was mentally unbalanced—I was horrified when Kevin told me about the incident in London last August. Don’t be angry with Kevin for telling me. He truly felt he was acting in your best interests by keeping me informed of the situation, and he was seriously worried by the possibility of you marrying such a man. I know that by firing Scott I was destroying his motive for marrying you, and so you may well accuse me of interfering once more in your private life, but I must defend myself by saying that I had to fire him anyway for business reasons, and that in the long run you must surely be better off without such a dangerous, unstable man who used you as he did.
“However, I do understand that you loved him very much, and that’s why you must believe me when I say I’m deeply distressed for your sake and want to do everything I can to ease your grief. You must realize that despite everything I too feel deeply bereaved. He was still my boy, as I always put it in my thoughts, and one of the most painful aspects of parenthood is that you go on loving your children no matter what they may do to hurt you.
“Please let me see you so that we can have the chance to comfort each other. I remain, as always, your loving and devoted father, CPVZ.”
“Dear Vicky: I finally realized why you weren’t answering my letters, and having just received confirmation that the last tape has disappeared from the machine in my office, I have decided with great reluctance that I must speak very plainly indeed.
“First, you must understand that I was deeply hurt by what Scott had done. I also felt bitterly angry with him, bitter enough and angry enough to lash out and say things that should never have been said. When someone hits you, your instinct is to hit them back. It may not be a very Christian response, but I venture to suggest it’s a very human one.
“The truth is that I just couldn’t handle the fact that Scott had rejected me so destructively—although this rejection is easier to handle now that I realize he couldn’t help himself. He was sick. His suicide proves that. Remember: sane people do not commit suicide. They take their lives when their minds are disturbed. I’m convinced Scott’s mind had been disturbed for a long time. Anyway, he’d certainly lost touch with reality. That much is obvious.
“I couldn’t have let you marry such a man. You had to be protected from him. I was afraid that after I’d fired him he might kill you in some outburst of uncontrollable violence. That’s why I had to lie and make sure he believed you no longer wanted him. I had to cut him out of not only my life but yours—I had to, Vicky, can’t you see? I did it for your sake. I did it because I love you. I did it all for you.
“You’ve got to see me and we’ve got to talk. Stop hiding from me now, please, and let’s meet face to face. CPVZ.”
“Vicky: Please. I can’t bear the way you’re trying to shut me out like this. You mean more to me than anyone else in the world, and you’re hurting me terribly. You know by now that although I have a lot of friends, there’s no one I can really talk to except you and Kevin, and Kevin looks like he’s settled in London for good, and I hardly ever get to see him nowadays. Of course I love Alicia, but we’ve nothing in common, and talking’s so difficult. You’re all I’ve got, Vicky, except the grandchildren, and they’re wonderful, but the younger generation are so strange nowadays and often I find I don’t know what to say to them. So we’ve got to put this tragedy behind us and face the future together. Why, we owe it to the kids not to remain estranged! I’m truly looking forward to taking Eric into the bank—I think I can hold on there till he’s twenty-five and capable of carving out a position for himself. I’m very proud of Eric. He’ll give everything meaning for me and make up for Scott’s terrible rejection. It’ll all come right in the end, you’ll see, and you’ll find someone else, the right man this time, and you’ll be happy again one day, I swear it. Now, sweetheart, please do write or call me on the phone—I’ll stand by you, I’ll help you through this, I’ll do anything, anything at all, to make things right. With all my love now and always, Daddy.”
“Father: Eric will not be going into the bank. He’ll major in environmental studies when he goes to college. This decision is final and I support it one hundred percent.
“In my opinion a meeting between us would serve no useful purpose. You killed the man I loved. What more can possibly be said? Vicky.”
VII
Sebastian arrived, announced laconically, “I’ll fix this,” and set to work. He talked to the children and made arrangements with Nurse for them to follow me to Europe so that we could all spend Christmas together after the funeral. He even arranged for my mother to take a Christmas cruise so that she wouldn’t be alone over the holidays. He talked to the police, the doctors, the bureaucrats. He organized the removal of Scott’s body to Mallingham. He retained the security men so that I could remain in seclusion. He conferred with my father’s aides to ensure that the inevitable publicity was kept to a minimum. He saw my father but he would not tell me what had been said. And finally he took me to England.
The English Sullivans were at the airport to meet us: Scott’s half-brothers, Edred and George; Scott’s half-sister, Elfrida. I had not seen them the previous summer. When Scott had given way to my reluctance to visit Mallingham, his English family, much annoyed, had refused to visit us in London and so my estrangement from them had persisted, but as soon as I saw them now I realized all animosity was at an end. I had to keep reminding myself how closely they were related to Scott. They seemed so alien with their English voices and English clothes and English manners, but they were kind in that understated way which was so typically English, and said how sorry they were and how I mustn’t worry because all the funeral arrangements had been made and when I said a martini did I mean a dry martini cocktail or straight vermouth, and then they took me to a London hotel and there was a comfortable bed and I slept.
Rose arrived the next day from Velletria, but not Lori; Lori wasn’t coming to the funeral. She had just heard that Andrew’s plane was missing over Vietnam and her eldest son had been arrested on a drug charge and her psychiatrist had advised her against making the long journey to Europe.
“Maybe Vicky did something right,” said Sebastian. “Did you ever consider that?”
“The trouble with Lori,” said Elfrida, the school principal, “is that she sees her children as two-dimensional figures who boost her ego and exist to decorate her beautiful home. I never trust any mother who boasts nonstop about how perfect her children are. It usually means she hasn’t the faintest idea what’s going on.”
“Vicky knows what’s going on,” said Sebastian. “Vicky listens when the little monsters talk to her. Vicky communicates,” he added, as if pronouncing the last word on the subject, but they must have thought this the most eccentric judgment, for of course I couldn’t communicate then with anyone. I barely spoke, barely ate, barely breathed the air which Scott had ceased to breathe, but when I came at last to Mallingham I understood that time which he had described as time out of mind, and in seeing his world through his eyes I was able to step out of my grief and accept his death as he himself had accepted it, as an end to violence and a dissolution of the structure of time which had imprisoned him. Nothing mattered now except that he was to be at peace with his father in a place where the sea wind hummed over the marshes of a remote, ancient, beautiful land; nothing mattered now except that I had brought him home.
I was aware of the voices again, sometimes talking to me, sometimes talking past me, sometimes talking far away when they thought I couldn’t hear.
“Vicky looks as if she’s about to collapse.”
“Will she ever get through the funeral?”
“Vicky, dear, don’t you think you should go and lie down?”
“Maybe a doctor …”
“Vicky’s going to be all right,” said Sebastian. “Vicky’s okay.”
Voices, voices, voices, all floating on the air, and people wandering past like people in a dream, and all the while I looked past the lawn to the waters of the lake or leaned out of the window of my room to let the sea breeze cool my face, and always I thought how perfect, how peaceful, how right Scott was to want to come here.
“Now, Vicky,” said Elfrida to me briskly when she found me wandering in the garden on the morning of the funeral, “I’m going to be very bossy and interfering and give you a piece of my mind, because I really think someone ought to say certain things to you. Please don’t think I’m hostile, because nothing could be further from the truth. My experience as a headmistress has taught me that perfectly frightful parents can produce surprisingly nice children, so I’m certainly no longer prejudiced against you on account of your father—I judge you as you are and on your own merits.
“Now, you seem an intelligent woman with a reasonably pleasing personality, so there’s no reason why, after all this is over, you shouldn’t have a worthwhile, satisfying future. But you must pull yourself together and start making plans. Why don’t you stay in England for a while and get right away from that dreadful New York? Sebastian says you’ve often toyed with the idea of taking a degree, so may I suggest that the time for toying is past? Now is just the time when you should take action! It would give you not only a new interest but also a new life, which seems to be exactly what you need in order to recover from this catastrophe. Why don’t you take a degree at my old university, Cambridge? They do take elderly students with no qualifications except a reasonable intelligence and a strong desire to learn, and my former tutor’s still there—I’ll introduce you to her, and I know she’ll do all she can to help. Also, Sebastian could be useful—he knows Cambridge well enough to help you set up a home there.
“Oh, yes, I know what you’re going to say! You’re going to say: ‘I can’t, I can’t, the children need me!’ Now, Vicky, you must be realistic about this. Your children are growing up, and unless you prepare for the future now, you’re going to wake up one morning and find all the birds have flown from the nest and your life is completely empty, because after dedicating your life to your children you have no life of your own to sustain you once they’re gone. I see this syndrome constantly recurring among the mothers of my pupils, and believe me, such mothers are much to be pitied.
“No, don’t try to argue with me! Eric and Paul will obviously complete their education in America, but there’s no reason why Samantha and Kristin shouldn’t be at boarding school in England—heavens, I’ll take them myself! We’re not so far from Cambridge, and anyway, a happy boarding school like mine would be a painless way for them to settle in a new country and make plenty of friends. As for Benjamin, he’s just the right age for English prep school … oh, yes! Don’t say he’s too young! Boys here always get sent away to school young if it’s financially possible—the parents know it’s better for them than being coddled at home. The English are sentimental about animals, but not children, and anyway, from what I hear about Benjamin, it’s obvious he would thrive at prep school.
“So if all the children are away at school, this will leave you very much on your own, and while I do understand that this must be a horrifying prospect, I would suggest to you … Vicky, what is it? Why are you laughing? Oh, God, Vicky, you’re not going to have hysterics, are you?”
I pulled myself together and reassured her I was not. Then, as if to prove both to her and to myself how calm and rational I could be, I set aside all thought of the children and made the request I had been nerving myself to make ever since I had read my father’s attempt to justify the part he had played in Scott’s death.
“Elfrida,” I said, “do you still have your copy of your brother Tony’s posthumous letter?”
VIII
I read the letter twice, once with great speed, once very slowly, and afterward wondered how I could ever have dismissed the details of Steve’s death as a series of past incidents which didn’t concern me. I wondered too why I had automatically thought Scott neurotic when he had called my father a murderer, and why I had not questioned my father more closely when he had referred with such evasive reluctance to Tony’s letter.
Then I remembered my old attitude to my mother. Perhaps I had known the truth subconsciously all along. Perhaps, repeating a well-worn defensive pattern, I had simply found it less painful to shut my mind against the facts I hadn’t wanted to know.
I considered those facts. I considered them with the calm detachment which often follows in the wake of emotional exhaustion. I considered them for a long time.
As the result of my father’s deliberate cold-blooded maneuverings in 1939, Steve Sullivan had got drunk, gone out, and smashed himself to death on an empty country road. The truth of the matter was that my father had pushed Steve toward that drunken car crash as violently as he had pushed Scott toward that bloodstained bath—and in both cases he had persisted in declaring that his unjustifiable crimes were justified.
I didn’t like to think of such actions going unpunished. That didn’t seem right at all, although I couldn’t think what I could do about it. I was trembling and could no longer reason clearly, so I decided I would have to think about my father later, after the funeral.
I went downstairs to join the others, who were all waiting to set out for the church, and soon I heard the conversation droning around me again—voices, voices, voices, all talking of the future, the present, the past, but I was beyond them all with my memories of Scott, and as the moment of the funeral drew nearer, I was conscious again of seeing his world through his eyes and moving to meet him across the borders of time.
“ ‘To be conscious,’ ” I said, “ ‘is not to be in time.’ ”
“That’s T. S. Eliot, isn’t it?” said Rose. “A very overrated poet, I’ve always thought.”
But Sebastian took my hand in his as we set out for the church, and Sebastian said, quoting from the Four Quartets: “ ‘What we call the beginning is often the end
and to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from …’ ”
IX
The sky was gray above the square tower of Mallingham church, and the trees beyond the churchyard were bare. The Episcopal service was short. The coffin was lowered into the ground, the minister closed his book, and the chilly east wind from the sea ruffled the wreaths of flowers. I had ordered many flowers, not just for Scott but for Steve and Tony, for Dinah and her son, Alan, all either buried or commemorated beneath the boughs of the cherry tree which Dinah herself had planted to flower every spring.
I dried my eyes and stood watching all the flowers. They were chrysanthemums, bronze and yellow. I liked looking at the flowers, but presently Elfrida murmured, “Vicky …” and I knew it was time to go.
But Sebastian said, “She’d like to be alone for a moment.”
They went away, and I was alone.
Instantly I was seeing through Scott’s eyes again, and I was aware, as he would have been aware, of time bending so that past and present seemed to flow into each other in a long unbroken loop. I looked around the churchyard, and although the cherry tree was bare, by some miracle I could see it in full bloom. I glanced up at the church tower, and for a single second a thousand years coexisted simultaneously in a single chord of time.
The tears dried on my cheeks. I stood very still, afraid to move for fear of shattering the spell, but then I heard the lych-gate click far away and I knew at once that my father had entered the churchyard.
He came slowly toward me. He wore black and looked very neat and quiet and old.
“So you did come,” I said as he halted. “They said you wouldn’t. But I knew you would.”