He hauled me out of the dining room in the middle of dinner and marched me into the library. Naturally I thought I had done something wrong. I was just beating back the lump in my throat with iron determination when he smiled at me, and as the expression in his eyes softened I saw all the affection he had denied me before.
“Sit down, Neil,” he said. “I want to talk to you.”
We sat facing each other across the small table by the window. Outside the dusk was deepening, and the twilight seemed mysterious. I could not see the expression in his eyes, but at last he leaned forward in his chair and said abruptly, “I signed my new will today. You’ll get what you want.”
I was struck dumb, I did try to say that what I wanted was for him to live to a ripe old age, but he cut me off.
“No platitudes,” he said. “This is business. I’ve made a decision in regard to a large amount of money and I want to make quite sure we understand each other. In particular I want you to understand that great wealth and its corresponding power is not a blessing but a burden, and that I’ve chosen you to be my heir not because you’re my great-nephew—I’m not sentimental about blood relationships—but because I think you’ll be able to carry that burden without being ground to dust by it. Your mother has faults, but she’s given you a stable family home, a civilized upbringing and a persistent grounding in Christian ethics. As an agnostic I’m sufficiently detached to admire the moral strength of Christian principles, and as a cynic I can afford to retain my innate belief in the virtues of family life. But never think yourself indestructible, Neil. Remember the philosophy of the Greeks and do nothing to excess.”
“Yes, sir,” I said respectfully, thinking how strange it was that words which had sounded so tedious when spoken by my mother should now sound so fraught with significance.
He told me to watch my liquor consumption and warned me how insidiously a taste for alcohol could slip out of control. “… And by the time you have a shot of gin in your breakfast orange juice you’ll be of no use to anyone, least of all yourself. Do I hear you thinking that this can’t possibly happen to you? I tell you it can. You can’t imagine the pressures and tensions you’ll have to live with. You’ll long to do anything to relieve the strain. … Has that amazingly ineffectual stepfather of yours ever talked to you about sex?”
“No, sir.”
“Then let me tell you this: trust no one. People will do anything for money, anything at all. Be skeptical when a woman tells you she loves you.” Avoid all homosexual encounters. Yes, yes, I know you’re only interested in girls, don’t look so insulted! But a boy who’s as handsome as you are inevitably attracts homosexual attention, and you must be on your guard against making mistakes which can result in black-mail, scandal and ruin. Always remember that in your private life one small slip can have far-reaching and disastrous consequences, and no matter how rich you are you must never forget that self-indulgent exercise of your emotions is the one luxury you’ll never be able to afford. Has anyone ever told you about my disastrous entanglement with my first wife, Vicky’s mother?”
He began to talk of the past. He talked for a long time while the moon rose higher in the sky and the sea shone silver far away below the pine trees. After a while I realized he was explaining himself to me with much painful honesty because he wanted me to understand his mistakes and avoid them when I picked up the life he would someday leave behind.
I listened and listened. Sometimes he would reach across the table as if by grasping my hand in his he could somehow soften that story of revenge, and once he broke off to say, “I’m sorry. You’re so very young and you’ve seen so little of the world. This must be very difficult for you.”
My hand curled trustfully in his. I was a small child again, unquestioningly loyal and obedient, willing to follow him to the ends of the earth.
“And so we come at last,” he said, giving my hand a quick clasp and releasing it, “to Miss Dinah Slade.”
The moonlight shone full on his face. As his dark eyes looked straight into mine he exclaimed with a laugh, “You and Dinah! Such ambition!” And he began to talk about his notorious English mistress.
I did not like what I heard.
He gave me every single detail. He spared neither me nor himself. Looking back in later life, I knew I myself would never have had the courage to talk to an ignorant eighteen-year-old boy about the marital problems which Miss Slade had so usefully resolved. He even talked about his epilepsy, and that was the hardest of all for him; I saw his fists clenching with tension, while his dark eyes seemed to burn in his white set face.
“You don’t have to tell me this, sir,” I blurted out at last.
“Yes, I do,” he said instantly. “I must tell you everything. I must pass it on.”
Finally I summoned the nerve to ask, “Are you sure you’re not going to marry Miss Slade?”
He never turned a hair. “I shan’t marry her,” was his quick terse response. “Satisfied? Why don’t you ask instead if I plan to acknowledge her son?”
I knew at once he was testing me. I kept my face impassive, but I could feel the blood already welling behind the membrane of my Achilles’ heel.
“Maybe you think he’s not your son,” I said politely.
“He’s mine. Try again.”
The membrane burst. I looked at the floor and ceiling and out the window in an attempt at nonchalance, but when I looked back at him I saw that he knew. Worse still, he was amused.
“Are you sure he’s yours, sir?” I said. “If Miss Slade’s so enterprising perhaps she’d hedge her bets once she realized you hadn’t fathered a child since before she was born.”
He looked at me for a long moment. His eyes were brilliant but devoid of any expression.
My nerve cracked. I blushed. Tm sorry … I didn’t mean … Forgive me, sir, I want to take that back—”
“Be quiet. There’s no need to go groveling on all fours just because you’ve made a perfectly valid point. Let’s settle this matter once and for all. That child is mine. I know it and you’d better accept it. I’m not acknowledging him because I want to protect Sylvia and because I want to protect Alan himself from my money and position, just as your mother once tried to protect you. If you hadn’t been so busy being jealous you would have recognized these very obvious reasons right away.”
“I’m not jealous, sir.”
“Convince me.”
“Well, there’s no need, sir, is there? I’m your heir and he isn’t.”
“Precisely!” His stern brutality vanished as if he could no longer sustain it, and standing up he patted my shoulder kindly as if I were once more a protégé who had shown promise. “In my opinion,” he said as I too rose to my feet, “a great deal of nonsense is talked about the biological tie. Personally I’m a believer in adoption.”
I nodded. I was no longer looking at him and he, I sensed, was no longer looking at me. Slipping his hands casually into his pockets, he moved away from me toward the door.
“You’ll change your name to Van Zale, of course,” he added as an afterthought.
“Yes, sir.”
“Paul Cornelius Van Zale.”
“Yes, sir.”
He smiled. He was satisfied. “Let’s rejoin the others,” he said, opening the door. “We can talk again later.”
Less than a week later when he was shot to death in his office I stepped forward at once to fill his shoes.
V
Everyone said I couldn’t do it. I was surprised. I had already figured out that no one could stop me. The money was mine outright.
When everyone had finished telling me that I should go to Europe, to Yale, to hell—indeed to anyplace except One Willow Street—I moved into Paul’s house, rolled up my sleeves and started working harder than any of them.
My friends were enrapt. I had been the quietest of the four and the shyest, yet now I was telling even my parents, “This is what Paul would have wanted,” and insisting on going my own way. My confide
nce, mystical and absolute, ended my role of Midwestern oddity and transformed me overnight into the leader of the pack. Jake and Kevin were struck dumb with awe. Only Sam, practical as always, recovered quickly enough to beg, “Take me with you!”
Someone asked me years later, “Why did you like Sam the best of those three boys?” and the answer was that I didn’t. I liked Jake Reischman best. Despite the difference in our religions we came from similar intellectual homes, and I felt I had plenty in common with him. Kevin shared my interest in sports, but he was so boisterous that I found him tiring. Sam I liked because he was so friendly, but we never seemed to have much to talk about and I found it puzzling that he seemed so uneasy with Jake. It was only later that I realized he was secretly intimidated by him. Poor Sam! Jake was such an aristocratic New Yorker, so confident in himself, his family and his place in the world. His family had been in America for over a hundred years, and in the Reischmans’ sumptuous Fifth Avenue mansion conversation at dinner was conducted in German, German wines alone were admitted to the cellar and only music by German composers was played on the huge organ in the atrium. For Sam, who had frantically tried to shed his German heritage ever since his immigrant parents had been pelted with rotten eggs on the outbreak of war, Jake’s pride in being German was incomprehensible.
“Well, of course it was difficult when the War was on!” said Jake astonished when one evening Paul forced the two of them to discuss what it meant to them to be German-American. “Of course it was hard, trying to do our duty as American citizens when we couldn’t help but sympathize with all those German people who had never wanted war in the first place! But that war wasn’t our fault. Why should I feel guilty about Prussian militarism? It had nothing to do with me!”
Sam said timidly that perhaps it was different if one was Jewish.
“What’s that got to do with it?” said Jake. “I’m just as German as you are!”
“Except that your real name isn’t Hans-Dieter,” said poor Sam, and he told us about the cruel teasing he had suffered at school before he had rechristened himself with an all-American name.
Jake was horrified by the story. During the War he had shared a tutor with some other boys from rich German-Jewish families and he had had no idea how the less privileged German-Americans had suffered.
“You must come to stay with us!” he exclaimed spontaneously. “We’ll make you proud to be German again!” And after that he took great trouble to put Sam at ease until by the end of that first summer we had all forgotten that Sam’s background was different from ours.
However, although it was Paul’s death which flung me together with Sam, I suspect that even if Paul had lived Sam would still have become my closest friend, good-natured, hard-working, utterly heterosexual Sam with his phonograph, his jazz records and his daring pictures of Clara Bow. In his company I could always relax. In fact my trust in him was absolute, and when I let him link his future with mine I came to realize that no two brothers could have been bound together more tightly by a blood tie than I was bound to Sam Keller by the sheer ordeal of our first two years at Van Zale’s.
To say that we relied on each other heavily when we first entered the bank would be an understatement. I could not have traveled so far so fast if it had not been for Sam, and he in his turn was equally indebted to me. We were like a pair of acrobats on the highwire with nothing to save us from the long drop but our wits and the perfect coordination developed by necessity in order to survive. I saved him, he saved me, and during the two years which began with Paul’s murder and ended with the annihilation of his assassins I lost count of the times Sam and I came to each other’s rescue.
But we survived. We survived our ignorance and inexperience; we survived Paul’s enemies; and we even survived his friends. That, on reflection, was probably our greatest triumph of all.
We worked day and night. I hired the best teachers to give us private tuition in banking, economics and law. I cultivated the oldest partner and picked his brains elaborately. We went through every major file Paul had handled and hammered the facts into a coherent summary so that we understood what the clients had wanted, how the bank had responded and what the result had been. We often worked into the early hours of the morning, but at seven o’clock we would always be up to take a swim in the pool before heading downtown to the office.
Sam lived with me at Paul’s house. At first it seemed merely a useful solution to his homelessness, but we soon realized it was the only possible arrangement in view of our iron schedule of study. Our total reliance on each other made serious quarreling out of the question, but when we found we were getting on each other’s nerves we decided we should take one night a week off to relax and go our separate ways. Ironically, despite this sensible decision, we still ended up together. We were secretly scared of New York and huddled together for comfort like a couple of hillbillies from the boondocks. First of all we didn’t even have the courage to date; Jake and Kevin had introduced us to a few girls, but they were too upper-class for Sam and too sophisticated for me. However, Sam had already discovered he wasn’t cut out for the celibate life, and eventually we fell into the habit of stopping by at a safe cozy little speakeasy in the East Eighties and pretending we were impoverished college students. It was always fun later to see the girls’ faces when we took them home to Fifth Avenue.
It was a long time before I felt truly at ease in New York. Despite our Saturday nights on the town the city remained a backdrop to me, an alien setting in which I was obliged to live and work, and it was not until Steve Sullivan went to Europe in March 1929 that I felt secure enough to discover that New York really did have more to offer than Velletria, Ohio. I was twenty-one by that time, quite old enough to enjoy the pleasures of the wicked city, and more than ready to toss Paul’s cautionary advice to the winds. Sam was there with me, in exactly the same position. We cast off the shackles of rigid self-discipline at exactly the same moment, and all through that doomed summer before the Great Crash when Steve was making a fool of himself in Europe, we behaved in a way which would have bleached my mother’s hair snow white and prompted Paul to turn groaning in his grave.
VI
We behaved like a pair of juvenile satyrs. I guess it was a delayed reaction to Paul’s death. For months we had clung to the, comforting familiarity of our former life, but eventually there came a point when we had to realize that our lives had changed beyond recognition, and although we were excited by this transformation we were also frightened. It was disorienting as all the old landmarks fell by the wayside. Although we knew we had to adapt in order to survive, our confusion was so massive that we could not at first perceive the new roles we had to assume. The pressures mounted, the strain increased and when it became essential for our stability that we found a way to defuse these tensions we turned to Paul’s favorite method of relaxation.
Paul might have sympathized with our desires but not with our outrageous lack of discretion and common sense. It was only a matter of time before the mills of God began to grind us exceeding small, and the grinding began in September when a girl I had seen three times in July telephoned to say she was pregnant. That same day Sam thought he had contracted some particularly revolting complaint from a recent encounter. As it turned out, both the girl and Sam were mistaken, but the incidents frightened us so much that we decided the time had come to discuss, analyze and reform our private lives.
“It was all Steve’s fault,” groaned Sam. “If we hadn’t been so relieved to see the back of him we wouldn’t have gone out and got drunk at Texas Guinan’s. No wonder she said ‘Hello, suckers!’ Since then it’s been downhill all the way.”
I found a pencil and listed our new rules of conduct “Number one,” I declared, “no sex at the office. Number two: no messing around except in locked bedrooms out of sight and hearing of the servants. Number three: no picking up stray broads in speakeasies. Number four: condoms at all times. Number five: absolute respectability in dress, deportment and deme
anor. Number six: church on Sunday.”
“I’ll leave that last one to you,” said Sam, “but the next girl I like I’m going to date for six months and I’m not going to take out anyone else during that time. And I’m going to write to my parents every week without fail.”
“Maybe I’ll invite my mother to visit me,” I mused. “Then she can see that contrary to all her expectations I’m leading a moral Christian life.”
A week later I met Vivienne Coleman. I had successfully deluded myself that I had returned to sanity in my private life, but as subsequent events proved I was merely pausing in midair while I leaped out of the frying pan into the fire.
Two
I
THAT SUMMER SAM DEVELOPED a passion for the old tune “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” and played his favorite recording of it night and day. He had no interest in classical music but was addicted to all forms of American music from ragtime to Dixieland and from blues to bluegrass. He himself played no instrument, but when Kevin walked out of Harvard Law School, turned his back on his wealthy family and retired to Greenwich Village to write the great American novel we used to invite him and some of his new musician friends to our house for a jam session which Sam would record. My lasting memories of that summer revolve around the breakneck pace of life at the office, where we were all mesmerized by the dizzy gyrations of the ticker tape, and the breakneck pace of life at home when Kevin roared uptown with his friends, our girls streamed in to kick up their heels and we all got drunk on bathtub gin while dancing our hearts out to Charlestons like “Yes, Sir, That’s My Baby”—and to Miff Mole’s Molers version of “Alexander’s Ragtime Band.”
The Rich Are Different Page 58