The Rich Are Different

by Susan Howatch

  “I’ve never met Chalmers,” I said, “but I’ve heard of him.”

  “He’s an expert on the cotton industry. I threw a little business his way the other day when someone from the garment district came to us about expansion. It was a small matter, too trivial for Reischman’s, but these days Chalmers appreciates whatever he can get. He did a similar favor for my father once when the positions of our firms were reversed.” He looked out the window as he allowed me time to digest this information. “Chalmers will take you as a full partner,” he continued presently. “He admits he hates the thought of selling his business or merging with another firm, yet he has no sons to succeed him. The firm’s ailing but it’s basically sound. The old man’s ailing too but he can give you what you want.”

  “I can’t bring any money into the firm.”

  “He says he’ll overlook that. I told him you were a brilliant young man who could bring his house back to the prestige it enjoyed thirty years ago, and he believed me.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Reischman.”

  “My pleasure, Mr. Van Zale.”

  He smiled. I smiled. We sat there disliking each other and then he said smoothly, “He’s attracted to your name too, of course. For a novus homo like Chalmers a patrician name such as Van Zale has a certain irresistible charm.”

  There was another pause. I waited. At last with perfect timing Max Reischman added casually, “I believe he has a daughter,” and all the cynicism of a sophisticated New Yorker was reflected for a second in his chilly blue eyes.

  I did wonder if Miss Chalmers was either deformed or a mental defective, and was therefore most relieved to discover she was a vivacious young woman with a figure which would have put an hourglass to shame. I did wonder too why old Chalmers was so frantic to see her settled, but it was only after I was married that I realized he had probably been terrified she would destroy her reputation before she made a good match. Marietta may not have been a deformed imbecile, but she was certainly a promiscuous fool.

  However, it took a couple of years for Marietta to become tiresome and meanwhile it seemed that matters had worked out well. Max Reischman had got rid of me without having to set me up in my own firm, and I now controlled a private banking business which, though not yet my own, would certainly be mine in the course of time. I already had a roster of clients. All I had to do was to transform the firm into the most successful second-rank house in town.

  To be a second-rank house in New York was not necessarily to be second-rate, for plenty of second-rank houses had stalwart prosperous reputations. The difference between them and the front-rank houses which ruled investment banking lay most noticeably in their clients. Morgan’s clients were the leading corporations of America and foreign governments, while Chalmers’ clients were more likely to run mail-order businesses or a group of garment factories. However, a second-rank house could be influential, and often the big houses such as Morgan’s would use a solid second-rank house as a partner in a deal too inconvenient for them to handle alone. If I could only build up my house’s wilted reputation I knew it would be only a matter of time before I could at last cross swords with the House of Clyde, Da Costa at One Willow Street on the corner of Wall.

  I worked hard and lived dangerously. I took on any business that came my way and hustled for new ventures with the verve of a flimflam man. I gambled on clients that other houses had turned down, I swung deals no one else would touch and I dived deep into debt as I lived like a millionaire to woo and impress the biggest clients in town. I had a large house off Madison, a brougham, a barouche and an imported 1904 Daimler Landaulette; I had innumerable servants, a gorgeous bejeweled wife, a yacht, a private railroad car and a cottage at Newport; I belonged to fourteen different clubs, gave enormous balls and lavish dinner parties, and made sure my name was constantly before my potential clients in the society columns of the New York newspapers. I dazzled New York, I horrified every banking house by my skill in evading the law that a private banker must not advertise, and I infuriated the snobs who wanted to call me shoddy but could not because of my ancient pedigree.

  I also made a great deal of money.

  By the time I was forty I was no longer a confidence man fooling New York by pretending I was already successful. I was a millionaire several times over, my creditors had all been paid and I had the sharpest, flashiest, richest second-rank house in New York. The firm was now called P. C. Van Zale and Company, my father-in-law was long since dead and Marietta was my ex-wife. My enemies had given up predicting I was riding for a fall and my friends were hailing me as a genius, but no one dreamed that my greatest ambition was still unfulfilled. In fact, I doubt if anyone thought I now had any ambition other than dressing like a dandy, living like a lord and sleeping with every society woman in town.

  However, there was no denying my success, and everyone, even Jason Da Costa, now sought my company.

  “Hello, Paul! We always seem to be bumping into each other these days, don’t we? How are you?”

  I can see him now as he was then, three years past forty but still in his prime. His thick glossy hair still waved in exactly the right places, his florid, arrogant, handsome face was still just as distinguished, and his brown eyes were just as cool, hooded and haughty. He had a trick of letting his eyelids droop lazily as he looked down his long Roman nose. Women found this mannerism irresistible, his opponents found it intimidating and I found it thoroughly ridiculous.

  “Paul, there’s something I’ve been wanting to say to you for a long time. I want to apologize for all that verbal hazing I gave you in the past. I’m afraid I was a spoiled insensitive young man and I’d like to think I now have more compassion and humanity. I’ve always been true to that promise I made to your father, you know. I swore it on my honor as a gentleman and I hope I’m gentleman enough to know that one should always be loyal to one’s class.”

  Normally I would have found this pompous expression of the philosophy of the Eastern-Seaboard oligarchy at least worth a smile, but on this occasion all attempt at humor was impossible. After a pause I said, “I’m well now. I’m cured.”

  “Well, of course I realized …” He droned on for a minute or two about how he had never doubted it. Finally he said, “No hard feelings, Paul?”

  “No hard feelings, Jay.”

  “Fine. I’m glad. Stay in touch, won’t you, Paul,” he said with his spurious charm and glided away from me among the other bankers at the reception like a big shark cruising among a host of smaller fry.

  A month later after we had both participated in a Morgan syndicate, I offered him a place on a list of preferential clients who were certain to make a hundred percent profit if they bought securities in a railroad I was reorganizing. Two months later he returned the favor. Within six months he was inviting me to his house to discuss sharing the load of launching a new copper mine in Utah.

  “How kind of you,” I said. “Is my uncle involved in this?”

  “Well, Mr. Clyde is semi-retired now, but yes, he’s interested in this deal.”

  “Then I insist that you both walk down Willow Street to my office and allow me to be the host at the meeting. I called on Mr. Clyde once and he never returned the courtesy. I think he’ll agree it’s owing to me.”

  There was a pause while Jay summed up the situation and decided he had nothing to lose except a useful ally for the copper flotation.

  “I’ll talk to Mr. Clyde,” he said.

  My Uncle Lucius protested he had arthritis. I said the deal was off. Jay, much annoyed by my uncle’s stubbornness, carted him into my office in a wheelchair.

  “Uncle Lucius!” I exclaimed. “How nice!” And I clasped his hand with a warmth which chilled him.

  “Suppose I ought to congratulate you, Paul,” he muttered into his moustaches.

  “Why, no, Uncle Lucius!” I said with my fondest smile. “You have only yourself to congratulate. It was you who gave me my ambition to be a banker.”

  Uncle Lucius went purpl
e but said nothing. Jay looked wary. I watched them serenely as sherry and pound cake were served, and reflected how fortuitous it was that my uncle was now a mere sleeping partner while Jay held the reins of power in the firm.

  We began to discuss business. After ten minutes Uncle Lucius had recovered from his sulks, and after half an hour he was garrulous. Finally I held up my hand, silenced him and said casually to Jay, “Have that nurse wheel him out, would you? Senile behavior is really so damnably tedious and I think you’ll agree that his presence here is quite immaterial to our discussions.”

  Jay never hesitated. Lucius Clyde was past history and I offered a lucrative future. Like all gifted bankers Jay knew when to cut his losses.

  “I realize Paul’s being unforgivably rude, Mr. Clyde,” I heard him murmur to a sheet-white Uncle Lucius, “but I see little point in arguing with him. For the good of the firm …”

  After the male nurse had removed the wheelchair Jay and I looked at each other in silence. I knew then that he had my measure, just as I had his, and in the dark sinister depths of the ocean which was Wall Street, shark saluted shark in the teeming bloodied waters.

  The bizarrest part of all was that we were the perfect match. Once I thought that success had come early to Jay simply because he had had all the luck and the right connections, but now I saw for myself what I had long since come to suspect: that he was a man whose ability matched my own. Yet our talents differed greatly. Jay had the true financial brain, a skill in dealing with figures and a gift for developing complex mental abstractions which were awesome in their originality. My talent was for gambling, and I gambled with people. I was perfectly capable of working out a merger involving several million dollars, several types of securities, a selling syndicate of a hundred and fifty people, and the profit for all parties down to the last cent, but my success as a banker was primarily because I always knew which corporations should merge and which should not, which people should form the syndicate and which should be omitted, who should deal and who should stay on the sidelines. I knew how to get the most out of my staff too; I set the pace by working harder than anyone else, and I was always unstintingly generous to those who tried to work harder than I did. Jay, who also worked hard, kept himself aloof from his staff and as a result had less influence with them. Part of the trouble was that he had never had to work his way up through the ranks, but he was incurably snobbish and even looked down on Harvard men because they had not been to his beloved Yale. However, with his financial brain and my gambling streak we formed a formidable team.

  I have no idea when he first suspected I wanted his palace at One Willow Street. Maybe he always knew but, thinking himself impregnable, enjoyed playing me along, using my talent for his own profit and my obsession for his own amusement. Or maybe he did not at first see the drift of my ambition but knew instinctively that although I made a splendid collaborator I would make a lethal bedfellow. His house was large, but if he ever let my firm merge with his he might awake one morning to find that his house had become too small to hold the two of us in comfort. It was so much wiser to keep me in my house at the other end of Willow Street, so much safer to hold me at arm’s length no matter how often our names were joined together in business. Jay was no fool. He had my measure and he knew what was good for him.

  I was no fool, either. Jay had something I wanted, but without a mutual exchange of assets I was stuck, and I was just thinking in despair that I would never achieve my ambition of sitting in Lucius Clyde’s chair when the deck of cards in my gambler’s hands were reshuffled and I saw I had a winning hand.

  Vicky came back from Europe.

  IV

  “Good God!” said Jason Da Costa. “This can’t be little Vicky!”

  “Oh, Papa, Mr. Da Costa’s so handsome. …”

  They had not seen each other for several years, for Vicky had been living with my mother, whose social circle was far removed from my own. Also Jay had been overseas on business when Vicky had made her debut, and since his two sons were younger than she was he did not meet her through them. In the old days he would have seen her each summer at Newport, but since my divorce from Marietta I now retired to Bar Harbor each summer with my mother and daughter. In retrospect it seems odd that Jay had not seen Vicky since she was a child, but at the time it seemed unremarkable. I had not seen his boys for years either, and in fact failed to recognize them when they arrived at the huge ball I gave for Vicky to welcome her back to New York.

  It was the late fall of 1912. I was forty-two and had been married to Sylvia for four months. Jay was forty-five and between marriages. Someone had told me that he had developed a fatal weakness for young girls, but I had forgotten; it had hardly seemed important at the time.

  Vicky was twenty-one, and since her debut three years before her life had been conducted in the tradition of the most breathless romantic novel. She had fallen in and out of love at least a dozen times and had been pursued by a host of ardent admirers ranging from fortune hunters to rich rakes, from self-important idlers to humble clergymen and from sighing grandfathers to besotted youths. During these trying times I had almost expired with the torments of fatherhood, but eventually Vicky had become engaged to an admirable young man who had just graduated from Harvard Law School and was anxious to begin a career on Wall Street. However, no sooner had I heaved a sigh of relief than disaster had struck: the young man had become deranged over a forty-year-old actress, and the engagement had collapsed. As Vicky sank into a decline and I returned to the torments of fatherhood, my mother had exercised her practical streak with commendable speed and borne Vicky off to Europe immediately after my marriage to Sylvia.

  Fortunately, the young are very resilient. It took me much longer than Vicky to recover from her broken engagement, and presently my daughter was writing me ecstatic letters about the glories of the Italian lakes. If she had not spoiled her letters by saying she was seriously thinking of entering a convent I might have stopped worrying about her long before she returned, radiant as ever, to New York.

  Within two weeks she had fallen in love with Jay, and Jay was mooning around Wall Street in a manner recalling the narrator of Tennyson’s poem who had loitered yearningly around Locksley Hall.

  My first instinct was to ship Vicky back to Europe. I was actually sitting down with my mother to plot the details of the conspiracy when my mother succumbed to snobbery and aroused all my most contrary instincts.

  “For after all,” she said, “who are the Da Costas? Everyone knows the first Da Costa was a Portuguese Jew.”

  It was a fatal error. If she had simply said “a Portuguese merchant” I would have taken no notice, for the first Da Costa had indeed fitted this description. He had reached America soon after the War of Independence, established a small trading post in Boston and prospered in the best American tradition. His descendants had been marrying tirelessly into the best Anglo-Saxon stock ever since and had been practicing Episcopalians for at least a hundred years.

  “Jason Da Costa,” I said to my mother, “is no more a Portuguese Jew than I’m a Dutch patroon. And even if he worshiped in a synagogue I would consider it a mark in his favor.”

  “Well, of course, I know you chose to work in a Jewish profession, but—”

  “Mama,” I said, very angry by this time, “the vast majority of bankers in this country are not Jewish. They’re of British stock, Yankees just like you and me, and anyway it was a privilege, not a disgrace, to work in one of the finest investment banking houses in New York. …”

  And so the well-worn argument continued, my mother insisting that she wished health, wealth and happiness to every Jew in the land—so long as they neither married her granddaughter nor crossed her threshold—and I retorting heatedly that the German Jewish aristocracy of New York did not care about her petty threshold and would have considered a marriage with a gentile to be a mésalliance. My mother and I both knew that the one subject we had to avoid was my loyalty to the Jews, and so when we made t
he mistake of dragging the subject up we were even more angry with ourselves than with each other.

  Finally we both apologized, but the damage was done and I no longer wanted to engage my mother’s help in saving Vicky from Jay.

  Although my mother had picked a ridiculous objection to the match, there were several good reasons why I did not want Jay and Vicky to marry. The first was that Jay’s reputation with women was second only to mine and I was sure his infatuation with her would never last. The second was that Vicky appeared to have fallen in love on the rebound, never a stable state of affairs. And the third was that my desire to have my revenge on Jay for past humiliations remained undiminished.

  If he married my daughter I would have to forget, for Vicky’s sake, the dreams of revenge which had sustained me when I had been working as an office boy for five dollars a week. On the other hand … I considered the other hand. I thought of that great palace at Willow and Wall, I dreamed of a mighty front-rank house called Van Zale’s, I pictured myself sitting at last in Lucius Clyde’s chair. Even if I had to forgo my revenge I could still satisfy my ambition.

  I thought again of Vicky and Jay, and now as I thought of them my first feelings of revulsion toward the match faded away. I told myself sternly that I must be realistic and not indulge in some overemotional Victorian response. I had to draw a line between exercising reasonable care as a father and acting as if I were incapable of letting my daughter go, and to draw the line I had to face the facts. Vicky was obviously going to marry someone, and since she was past twenty it was equally obvious that she was going to marry soon. Since this was so, wouldn’t it be better if she married a man of experience instead of some callow youth who hardly knew what he was doing? If she married Jay she would be marrying an eminent man, rich, handsome and brilliant in his field, who would look after her devotedly for two years and possibly three. It would be a good experience for Vicky, and when she emerged from the inevitable divorce she would have sufficient maturity to cope with the fortune hunters and find at last a man who was truly suited to her.