I lit another cigarette and tried not to think how wonderful Emily sounded.
… And I felt so grateful to her that when I found out she wanted to marry me I thought, Well, why not? The kids were crazy about her. They kept dropping little hints about marriage—and so did everyone else, even Cornelius.”
“But why should Cornelius—”
“That kid would sell his own mother up the river if he could make a nickel profit on the deal!”
That sounded more like the Steve I remembered, but I was disturbed to see that the subject of Cornelius still obsessed him.
“But I’ve finally figured out a way to railroad the little bastard all the way out of One Willow Street!” he concluded triumphantly.
I smelled New York, the glittering barbarism, the wicked steamy heat, the primitive lawlessness of a wide-open town.
“So that’s why you’ve left Emily,” I said slowly.
“Hell, no!” he protested. “I’ve left Emily because she was driving me to drink—but that’s another story. No, the point is that now I’ve left her I’ll have no peace till I’ve got rid of Cornelius, and since I’ve known for some months that Emily and I were headed for disaster I’ve done my best to plan for the future. If you want to know the truth, I’ve made a secret deal with Lewis Carson and we’re all set to go full steam ahead. The kid doesn’t stand a chance.”
I thought of all I had heard about Cornelius. “Are you sure?”
“Sure I’m sure!” He was sighing in ecstasy, all his troubles forgotten, and as his blue eyes became misty with the thought of future triumphs he added dreamily, “Have you ever heard of the Glass-Steagall Banking Act?”
IV
The Glass-Steagall Banking Act, which Roosevelt had signed into law in mid-June of that year, could be compared with a flock of pigeons—the investment bankers’ pigeons which had come home to roost. It was part of Roosevelt’s New Deal for Wall Street, a legislative attempt to ensure that the events of October 1929 would never be repeated. Gone were the unregulated market, the despotism of the bankers and the gaudiest trappings of private enterprise. Egged on by an outraged public opinion, the federal government was moving into territory previously held by private individuals. The Securities Act, the first law aimed at Wall Street reform, contented itself by forcing corporations and investment firms to behave with greater integrity towards the people whose money they sought, but the structure of the investment banking houses had been untouched. It was left to the Glass-Steagall Banking Act to rip that structure apart. The government wanted complete separation of investment and commercial banking. No longer would the bankers be able to operate their own personal gambling machine where the odds always favored the house. Private investment banking houses such as Van Zale’s had to choose between deposit and investment banking, and the divorce was so noisy that even the City of London had been deafened by the howls of outrage from Wall Street.
“Roosevelt’s trouble,” said Steve bitterly, “is that he doesn’t understand finance. This act’s going to disrupt all the established ways of underwriting and distributing securities, and reduce the amount of capital available to float new issues. If we choose to remain investment bankers we lose all our deposit business—our working capital. If we choose deposit banking we become just like a commercial bank, required to submit to government examination and supervision. Whatever we do we’re castrated.”
“But not for long, I’m sure,” I said. “Americans are always so clever at solving problems.”
“Well, it’s funny you should say that. There’s a rumor that Morgan’s …”
The partners of the House of Morgan had decided that the firm should withdraw from investment banking but not, according to the gossips, for long. The theory was that once investment banking showed signs of recovery, Morgan’s would return to the game under a different name. There would be two separate Morgan’s, divorced by the law as required by the Glass-Steagall Banking Act but linked by the subtle ties of friendship, which not even Roosevelt could prevent by legislation.
“Don’t tell me,” I said. “Let me guess. You’re going to follow in the House of Morgan’s footsteps.”
“Not quite. Lewis and I have decided that Van Zale’s is going to stick with investment banking. It’ll be very rough at first, but if we tighten our belts we can hold on until we set up a second Van Zale’s to handle the deposit banking—a commercial bank of our own which we can borrow from whenever we like. It’s the Morgan principle, but applied in reverse.”
I tried to imagine what it would cost to launch a new bank. “Where are you going to get the money?” I said curiously. “Or shouldn’t I ask?”
“The little bastard’s going to produce the money! They say Jack Morgan’s going to sell his art collection to set up his son in the second Morgan bank, so why shouldn’t Cornelius sell a few Rembrandts to set himself up in the second Van Zale’s?”
The light dawned. “You’re going to oust Cornelius from Willow and Wall by offering him the top job at the commercial bank!”
“Exactly!” He beamed with pride. “Isn’t that a great idea? Cornelius gets all the independence and power he can possibly want, and Lewis and I get him out of our hair once and for all. Then when Lewis retires—”
“Wait a minute, Steve. Doesn’t there have to be very close cooperation between the two banks? Even though you have to be divorced by law didn’t you just say you have to be married by gentleman’s agreement?”
“But that’s the glory of it!” said Steve happily. “Cornelius won’t cut off his nose to spite his face. His survival will depend on ours, and vice versa. He’ll just have to get along with us, and anyway once he’s out of One Willow Street that won’t be so difficult. We’ll work out a truce.”
“Steve, I hate to remind you, but you’ve just walked out on his sister.”
“Honey, don’t be naïve!” He stared at me. “Cornelius isn’t the kind of guy who would ever let a personal relationship stand in the way of a successful business deal!”
“Well, I suppose that is just possible.” I glanced at the ice in the ice bucket. The cubes were shiny, pristine and cold. “Steve, your opinion of my naïveté is going to soar to new heights, but I must just ask one last question. What makes you so sure Cornelius is going to fall in with this gorgeous scheme of yours?”
“He’s got no choice!” Still fired by the glory of his plans, he gave me a sketch of the balance of power at Van Zale’s. Old Walter had died, Clay Linden had moved to another house and Martin Cookson too was on the brink of resigning. Both Clay and Martin had been irked by Cornelius’ rapid rise to power. The remaining partners, carefully handpicked by Steve and Lewis, would know whom they had to support in a crisis. “The fact is,” said Steve, “that so long as Lewis and I hang together there’s no way Cornelius can get around us. He could be difficult about the money—all right, I concede that. But if the worst comes to the worst we’ll find some other way to scrape up the money for the new bank, and anyway my whole point is that Cornelius isn’t going to make trouble, because he’s going to be thrilled with the idea. All that power! He’ll hardly be able to wait to get out from under our feet! Of course, we’ll have to send a couple of the new partners along with him to keep him on the rails, but he’s a bright boy and commercial banking’s straightforward. He’ll have a nice glamorous office and a cute secretary and his old pal Sam Keller and he’s going to have the time of his life. Lucky little kid! Imagine being a bank president at his age! He ought to go down on his knees and thank me and Lewis for making it all possible!”
“Hm,” I said.
“Anyhow, I’m going to be marking time in Milk Street until next June. Lewis and I agreed that it would be best if I gave Cornelius a few months to recover from the Emily business, and Roosevelt’s given us bankers a few months to make up our minds which way to leap. But Lewis will do the spadework in New York, so that we can make a public announcement on the anniversary of Glass-Steagall next June, and then I’ll
return to New York to pick up the reins again. Meanwhile …” He suddenly ran down like a gramophone. “I thought … maybe … these next few months …” He trailed off completely.
“Hm,” I said again.
“Later,” he said, skipping over the awkward few months he had in mind, “we could divide our time between England and America. You could open a branch of your business in New York. It would be wonderful for the kids, wonderful for us. … Christ, Dinah, for God’s sake say something!”
“I’m too frightened to speak. Go on.”
“Well, I …” He groped for words. “Maybe we never did know each other the first time around, but I knew you well enough to realize now that you’re the one woman I’ll always want to come back to. I want to try again, Dinah. I want to accept you as you are, because I know that unlike Emily you can accept me as I am. I love you, Dinah, and I’ll do anything to make things work, anything at all—Say, are you crying?”
“Steve, I’m so terrified of going down the wrong road again—I couldn’t bear to be hurt like that a second time.”
“Honey, there’s no repeat performance scheduled, I promise you.”
“But I’ve got to think—you’ve had days to think about this and I’ve only had minutes—”
“Sure.” He stood up clumsily, edged his way around the table and enfolded me in a bear hug. “When can I see you again?”
“Saturday.” That would give me forty-eight hours to sort out my most private fears.
“Here?”
“No,” I said, “Norwich. I’ll meet you at the station and take you to Mallingham to meet the twins.”
V
I summoned all my analytical gifts. I was determined to appraise the situation with logic, yet as I lay gazing vacantly into the darkness at two o’clock in the morning I only knew that I was a plain woman with a large nose and fat hips being pursued by six foot two inches of sexy successful American manhood, and my logic floated far beyond my reach.
With a sigh I left my bed and padded downstairs to brew myself a cup of tea. As I watched the kettle boil I told myself that I really had to be sensible. I was an old warhorse of thirty-two, not a gay young filly of seventeen. This man drank too much. We had little in common beyond the world of business, and to make matters worse we had sexual problems. Also any man who walked out on a perfect wife had to be regarded with extreme caution.
But he was gorgeous.
I started gazing vacantly into space again and recalled myself only when the steam threatened to levitate the lid of the kettle to remarkable heights. As I made the tea I started making excuses to myself. I had not yet heard his side of his marriage, but it was obviously a classic disaster of marriage on the rebound. If he were happy with me he would probably be able to reduce his drinking, and although our sexual relationship would without doubt be awkward when we attempted to resume it there was no reason why we couldn’t straighten out our difficulties, particularly if he was as willing as I was to be honest. It was true he shared none of my intellectual interests, but there was no law saying that two people had to have identical tastes before they could form a successful relationship. The worst problem, I thought as I made a superhuman effort to regard him dispassionately, was his inclination to regard adultery as a way of life. My experience with Paul had taught me that there was nothing which upset me so much as infidelity—possibly because I was basically an insecure person, but I wasn’t concerned about my motive and I had no intention of making excuses for my old-fashioned attitude, particularly since I suspected that Steve’s attitude was at heart identical to mine. I could well imagine his howls of outrage if I decided to sleep with other men. However, the plain truth of the matter was that I had no right to demand fidelity of him unless we were married, and I was almost sure that marriage with Steve would be a disaster.
I stared into my murky tea and thought about marriage. I was well aware that I could profit from psychoanalysis on the subject, but I didn’t see why a psychoanalyst should get paid for doing something I myself enjoyed so much. In my teens I had wanted to get married because I had wanted to conform. In my twenties I had not wanted to get married because I had not wanted to conform. In my thirties I was so worn out by the strain of nonconformity that I was quite capable of marrying for all the wrong reasons. For example, it was likely that I might marry Steve for the sake of the children, although it was my firm conviction that children were better off in a happy home run by one parent than in an unhappy home run by two.
The trouble was that I was convinced I would be unhappily married. I had no idea why. It was not enough to cite my father’s three disastrous marriages, because I wasn’t my father. It was certainly not enough to burble that marriage was a bourgeois institution; that was an amusing excuse but hardly a valid one, particularly since I had abandoned my Marxist leanings. It might be argued that I was frightened of men, but Paul had long since cured me of that sort of fear, and besides, I liked men and got along well with them.
I drank two cups of tea and considered marriage from the point of view of an emancipated woman. That promise to obey was a bit offensive. The loss of one’s name was vaguely obnoxious. The thought that one had given a man the legal right to commit rape was, of course, monstrous. But so what? I wasn’t some poor fishwife in the East End who was chained to her husband through economic necessity. If my husband abused me I was one of the few women fortunate enough to be able to walk out and sue him into a repentant stupor. So it was nonsense to argue that I opposed marriage because I was an emancipated woman.
I gave up and returned to bed, but towards dawn I couldn’t help thinking that if I really loved Steve I’d marry him without a second thought.
But I certainly found him attractive. Those electric blue eyes …
I fell asleep and had such pornographic dreams that I awoke blushing.
“I’m just off to my swimming lesson now, Mummy,” said Alan at my bedside.
“Alan—heavens, I’ve overslept! Why didn’t that nitwit Celeste wake me up? All right, have a nice time, darling—”
“I don’t want to go.”
“But Alan …”
The past came up to meet me. I was back with Alan in 1929 as I tried to explain to him that Steve and I had decided not to marry after all.
“But he was going to be a new daddy for me—you promised, you said you’d be a mummy and daddy, married with wedding pictures just like everyone else.” His white tense little face was upturned to mine. His dark eyes were bright with anger and pain. “Why can’t you be married, why not? Everyone else’s mummy’s married! If only you could get married, then I wouldn’t have to be different anymore. …”
I wouldn’t have thought it possible to experience such agonies of remorse. Paul had told me in 1922 that my attitude towards unmarried motherhood had been naïve, but it was not until after Steve left and Alan broke down that I had any conception of the suffering I had caused to the person I loved best. Given my peculiar circumstances, my unmarried motherhood was perhaps inevitable, but it was still unforgivably selfish. I make no excuses for myself. I had been wrong, blind, childish, stupid—and I had not only made the mistake once but was about to repeat it.
“I don’t want them,” Alan had said when I brought the twins home from the hospital. “Take them away.” He never told any of his friends that he had a new brother and sister. Soon he stopped inviting his school friends to tea, and the headmaster of the little school he attended in Kensington told me he was worried; Alan had become withdrawn, made no effort with his lessons and took no interest in games.
I made another effort to talk to him about the twins, but he burst into tears.
“Couldn’t you ask someone to adopt them? Couldn’t you give them away? Couldn’t you keep them at Mallingham so I didn’t have to see them so much?”
The dreadful questions went on and on.
“They’re only babies, Alan!” I pleaded. “They don’t mean to make you unhappy.”
He remained uncon
vinced, and the indifferent school reports continued while I worried about him unceasingly. I wondered if he should change schools but thought it better not to disrupt him. I wondered if he would be too disturbed to go to prep school to live in the masculine atmosphere I could not provide. I wondered if he would become a homosexual. I wondered if he would develop his father’s epilepsy. No possibility was too lurid to be considered by me in my anxiety, but at least I didn’t have to wonder what kind of mother I was. I knew I was a complete failure.
Yet I loved my children, and in the few blissful hours I spent with them each week I knew guiltily that my own suffering had been worthwhile. It was only Alan’s suffering which I found intolerable.
After Steve had left me I did not expect sympathy or approval from either my clients, the press or London society, so I cut myself off from them at once and lived like a recluse. Fortunately since Harriet had always shouldered the burden of the business entertaining, this retreat was easy for me, and soon I found that in a life devoid of social activity I could devote more time to the children. I bought my new house in London and took my time furnishing it; we visited Mallingham regularly and enjoyed long weekends in the country; I had plenty of free evenings to catch up on all the books I had wanted to read, and occasionally Cedric and I would go to the talkies together. I never went to the theater in case I should see someone I knew, but sometimes I would take Alan to an exhibition or a museum on a Saturday morning. This secluded life was certainly not without its compensations, but at the end of two years I was bored stiff and sexually frustrated. I had recovered from the brutal conclusion of my affair with Steve by that time and was willing to look elsewhere.
There was no shortage of men. I met plenty through my work, but when I found I was consistently balking at having another affair I realized that I had fallen into the old trap of comparing my new suitors unfavorably with my past lovers. Steve and Paul might have had their faults, but they had both been exceptional men.
The Rich Are Different Page 75