The Auerbach Will

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  Whose pictures these, we might gently inquire?

  Though one is recent, one from years ago,

  Which is the noble son and which the sire?

  What is it that the wisely child must know?

  How scant apart, in simple years, they seem!

  And yet full thirty years apart be they!

  Has it yet dawned, all clear, as in a dream,

  What these two images do seem to say?

  Father, or not? Whose stern but kindly gaze

  Stares down from high upon a paneled wall?

  Did he suspect throughout his final days

  That son he called a son was not a son at all?

  Whose faces, these, both whom you know so well?

  If walls could talk! If pictures, too, could tell!

  Not bad, he thinks. Not bad at all. Too good, in fact, for the rather private use to which the lines must be put. Good enough, indeed, to satisfy the wrong-headed editors of The Georgia Review, for whom Mogie occasionally writes under the nom de plume of “Lycidas,” and who have turned down three of his most recent efforts. But no, not yet. “J’Accuse!” must serve another purpose first. A pity, but there it is. He folds the sheet of paper, slips it in the breast pocket of his Weatherell suit, raises the writing table and snaps it into place. “I won’t need you again tonight, Warrington,” he says as he steps out of the car.

  “Have a pleasant evening, sir!”

  “I will, Warrington, I will.”

  Once inside his house, however, Mogie does not immediately go upstairs to Tina. First, he must go to his desk and copy his sonnet in a hand that will not be instantly recognizable. His own Italianate Chancery script is too distinctive. To copy his verses, he chooses plain block printing, of the sort taught to every schoolboy in the first and second grade. This chore completed, he opens his secret drawer, takes out his pipe, fills and lights it, and soon he is suffused with even higher spirits. An erection begins to swell in his trousers as he admires his handiwork and contemplates the excruciating pleasures that are to come. Elated, he moves quickly now. He goes to the bookcase, unlocks it with his key, and removes the two scrapbooks with their pages carefully marked with white strips of paper. Using his silver library shears with their mother-of-pearl handles, he then neatly excises the two pertinent photographs. He prints a date on each, then places them, along with the sonnet, in an ordinary white envelope, seals it, addresses it in the same schoolboy printing, and stamps it. “Farewell, my lovely,” he says, and takes another long, deep draw on his pipe. Invictus!

  He starts to ring for his butler to mail the letter, but then decides: too risky. Instead, he rises and, with one hand deep in his pocket to control the violent erection which seems about to burst through every seam in his clothing, he hurries out of the house again and, limping slightly because of his extraordinary condition, makes his way to the mailbox on the Fifty-second Street corner. To lift the lid of the mail chute and drop the letter in requires two hands, and for a moment he is terrified that one of his neighbors—walking a dog, perhaps—will see him in this state, but the street is empty. He lifts the lid, drops the letter in the box, and lets the lid fall closed with a gloriously satisfying slam. Darling Joan! He does another slam for good measure.

  Phase Two is complete.

  And now, just two blocks from his house, Mogie Auerbach floats—yes, floats!—homeward, Mogie Auerbach the Invincible, along Beekman Place, floats up his front steps, through the door, and up the curved stairway, calling ahead of him, “Daddy’s home, darling child!”

  Twelve

  “Daisy … dear,” Essie says, rising to greet her as Yoki ushers her into the library. “I’m so happy you could come.”

  The two women embrace, and then, holding each other at arms’s length, appraise each other and the inevitable changes that have occurred since 1965. “Well, all things considered,” Essie says, “I think we’ve both held up very well.” Daisy is, of course, some ten years younger than she. “Naturally, you don’t have to agree with me.”

  “But I do,” Daisy says. “At least we’re both still here.”

  Yoki reappears with tea things on a silver tray and sets them down.

  “Or would you prefer a serious drink?”

  “No, tea will be lovely.”

  “Now, sit down, Daisy, and tell me all your news.”

  “Well, the biggest news was my surprise at hearing from you.”

  The two women sit down side by side on the loveseat, and Essie pours the tea. “Is it still lemon and no sugar?”

  “You have a wonderful memory, Essie.”

  “I know I’ve been remiss,” Essie says. “I don’t know what happens, but there always seems to be something going on. But I’ve thought of you often, I really have.”

  “I’ve thought of you, too.”

  Now suddenly an odd silence falls between them, and Lord knows what either of the two women is thinking. But isn’t it always this way, when two old friends who have been parted for a space of years, who think that they have so much to say to one another, find, upon meeting, that they are at a loss for words? Preoccupied, they sip their tea with seriousness. Then both begin to speak at once.

  “I thought—”

  “There was—”

  “Did you—?”

  Then both laugh. “Who’s going to begin?” Essie asks.

  “You,” says Daisy. “I want to hear all about the children.”

  “Well, where to start? I have a pet grandchild, Josh, Junior—my new toy. I have lunch with him perhaps once a month. He likes wine lists. He likes to select the wine. He’s twenty-three, honors at Princeton, and he’s joined the company. Handsome. And his father—working very hard, traveling all over the countryside, just as Jake did. And Mogie—well, you know Mogie. He’s never believed in working very hard, and so he doesn’t. He has his collections, and now and then he writes about art in one of those little magazines. He shows them to me. I thought I knew something about art, but when I read Mogie’s articles I haven’t the foggiest idea what Mogie is talking about. He writes about ‘catholicity of taste,’ and I haven’t a clue what he means. He’s still in analysis, of course. He’ll always be. The problem, he once told me, was impotence. Why did he tell me that? It wasn’t something I wanted to know about. Anyway, maybe he’s making headway with his doctor because he just got married. Finally. To a woman who’s at least forty years younger than he. Maybe that’s the cure for impotence, who knows? And Babette … what month is this? January? Babette is in Palm Beach if it’s January, we’re not that close, with a new husband. Joe Klein. He’s all right. In summer, they go to Southampton. Babette likes the society life. And Joan—well, Joan has her newspaper. She still struggles along with it, I don’t know why. Joan is so—well, you know how Joan is. Her husband seems to want to take some sort of marital leave of absence. And Karen—Karen is still trying to get out from under Joan’s thumb. One romantic disaster after another. And Linda—do you remember Linda? She’s still my only great-grandchild. She’s nineteen now. Pretty. At Bennington. I love her very much. Let’s see, have I left anyone out? They still talk about having two sets of parents. You know, Babette and Joan, born when Jake and I didn’t have much. And Mogie and Josh, born—later. When they get together here, they all quarrel a great deal. I dislike family reunions with a passion.”

  “And Charles?”

  “Oh, Charles is fine. Going great guns. He’s board chairman now, but still very active in the company. I call him the elder statesman.”

  “Ah …”

  “Yes.”

  There is a little silence, and then Daisy, her eyes wandering upward to the Douglas Chandor portrait above the mantel, says, “And there he is.”

  “Yes. Wearing his famous frown. I wonder why Mr. Chandor couldn’t have painted him with just a trace of a smile. The famous philanthropist. But who knows? Maybe Jake wanted it that way. I argue with him now and then, when I’m alone in the room. I like to, because now he can’t talk ba
ck. Mary Farrell caught me doing it once, and probably thought I was losing my mind.”

  “Whenever he was rehearsing to make a speech, he’d frown at himself in front of a mirror,” Daisy says.

  “Yes. You know, it’s funny. The children talk about having two different sets of parents. But it sometimes seems to me as though I had two different husbands. The one I married was gentle, idealistic, romantic—dreamy, even. Then, little by little, he turned into”—she cocks her head in the direction of the portrait—“that. What changed him, do you suppose?”

  Daisy hesitates. Then she says, “Well, I always assumed it was Charles.”

  “Charles? Really? Whyever do you say that?”

  “Well, Charles was the gentleman. The diplomat. The peacemaker. Those were Charles’s talents, but he couldn’t have built Eaton and Cromwell on just that. He needed a strongman, someone tough, someone who could knock heads together. That had to be Jake, so Charles saw to it that Jake turned into that sort of person. I always saw Charles as kind of a benevolent Svengali.”

  “But how? How could he do that? I mean, I always knew that Charles was smarter than Jake, but—”

  “Exactly. That’s it. When Jake began to realize that, it put him on the defensive. It brought out Jake’s tough side. He reacted like a fighter who knows he’s being outsmarted in the ring, which was how Charles wanted him to react. Or at least that’s always been my theory—why they made a perfect team.”

  “Interesting,” Essie says thoughtfully. “But I never thought of Charles as being devious.”

  “No. Not devious. He didn’t have to be. But Charles was intuitive. It was all intuition. It created that special chemistry between them.”

  “Positive and negative electric charges.”

  “Exactly. Or that’s my theory.”

  “Funny. I always thought it might have had something to do with my brother. The way he was forced out of the company.”

  “But who engineered that? Charles.”

  “Or with me. Simply because Abe was my brother. That Jake could never get over that. That my brother and I came as a package, as it were.”

  “But it was Charles who figured out how to break up the package. And gave the job to Jake. Cracking the heads together.”

  “Or then, I sometimes used to think that it had something to do with a lie I told Jake once. A white lie, but a lie I know he never believed. It may not even have been a necessary lie, but at the time it seemed so.”

  Daisy is smiling. “Do you mean that was the only lie you ever told him?”

  Essie laughs and slaps her thigh. “Oh, Lord no! One doesn’t stay married to a man for fifty-eight years with just one lie!”

  Daisy studies her teacup for a moment, then says, “Did you love him, Essie?”

  “What a question! Linda asked me that same question the other night at the tree-trimming. It nearly knocked me off my pins.”

  “But seriously, Essie. I want to know.”

  Love him? It is a question Essie has not asked herself in years, but now, since Daisy is asking her to be serious, it is perhaps necessary to come up with a serious answer. Love him? Instead, she thinks, I want to replace my little Prince!

  Tell me a story, Mother.

  But not now, Prince. I have no time!

  Tell me about the little girl who fell down the rabbit-hole.

  Alice in Wonderland? Ask Fräulein Kroger to read it to you. It’s good for her. It helps her English. I’ve got to go now. Your Papa’s waiting ….

  At last she says, “Well, oh, yes. In the beginning, quite passionately. When I first met him I thought he was the handsomest man I’d ever seen. And that woman wouldn’t fall in love with the handsomest man she’s ever seen, when she’s the age I was then, which was just sixteen? To me, he was the Other Side. Another world. Little did I know …”

  “And later?”

  “Later, when it stopped—I was hurt, yes. But not any more. One of the nice things about getting older is that things stop hurting.”

  “He was always a little afraid of you, you know.”

  “Afraid? Jake afraid of me?”

  “Oh, yes. There was always something about you that he couldn’t control, that he couldn’t quite understand or deal with. An independence. With me, being essentially a lazy woman, it was easier. But with you—it was as though he never could be quite sure you wouldn’t do something, or say something, that would overturn his applecart. Puncture his balloon.”

  Essie considers this. “Well, in the very beginning, I was an experiment,” she says. “In those days, he was interested in uplifting people. And I suppose when a chemist mixes two alien substances in his retort as an experiment, he’s never sure whether or not there’ll be an explosion. Later, of course, Jake had—other interests.” She laughs. “Come to think of it,” she says, “he was probably a little bit afraid of both of us.”

  “Women.”

  “Yes.”

  Now Daisy laughs. “You’re probably right. Remember when his mother died? He sat down and cried like a baby. Whether out of grief or relief I never knew.”

  Now they are both laughing. “Out of relief, more than likely,” Essie says.

  “Funny, how we can sit here like this and talk of him as though he were—just another person. Not the great Jacob Auerbach. Or John Jacob Auerbach, as he sometimes called himself.”

  “But that’s all he was, of course. Just another person.”

  Thinking of this, another little silence falls between them. Essie rises and turns on the two lamps that flank the loveseat. “Getting dark.…” And then, “We’ve talked enough about me, Daisy. Tell me about you.”

  “Well, after Jake died, I was at loose ends for a while. I couldn’t afford the Pierre, of course, so I moved to the Village. I thought I was too old to marry, but then I was lucky. I met a wonderful man—Burton St. George—a widower, a stockbroker. I think I sent you the announcement of my wedding—”

  “Yes.”

  “He was very good to me. He died two years ago, and left me quite comfortable.”

  “Good.”

  “And my daughter lives in Columbus. I visit her about twice a year.”

  Essie studies her old friend’s face, thinking, Isn’t it strange, after all these years, that only now would she speak of her daughter.

  “Jenny married a lawyer, who’s been very successful, and they have two children, a boy and a girl, and now I’m a great-grandmother, too, Essie.”

  “Ah.”

  “So, in the end, life is fair, isn’t it? A fair enough deal. I have Jenny, and you have Josh.”

  Closing her eyes, Essie can only remember: But I want to replace my little Prince! Please let me replace my little Prince! Please let me try!

  The room is silent for a while as the afternoon shadows lengthen across the floor.

  Looking around the room, Daisy says, “The apartment is beautiful, Essie. I see you’ve brought back many beautiful things from The Bluff. But you always lived surrounded by beautiful things.”

  “Not always. But we didn’t know each other then,” she says. And then, “Yes, this is home for me now. Sold the place in Seagirt. Sold Saranac Lake. Sold The Bluff. The Bluff is gone—to a developer. I came back here. I was always a New York girl, you know, at heart. I was born in Russia, but New York was the only city I ever really knew.”

  “Do you ever see your brother?”

  “Hardly ever. Much as I used to love Abe, I can hardly bear to think of him now. After what he did. But you know all about that.”

  “I see him from time to time. Not being part of the family, it’s easier for me to forgive him, I guess. Besides, in a sense, I feel I owe him. If it hadn’t been for him, I wouldn’t have met you and Jake.”

  “Well, when you see him, give him my—no, don’t give him anything. I’ve given him enough already.”

  “Arthur is—forgive me, but he was Arthur by the time I knew him—is just … Arthur. I accept him. My lazy nature. And not being par
t of the family.”

  “You’re the closest thing to family, Daisy.”

  “And it was so strange. This week, when I had the note from you, I also had a telephone call from Joan. It was as though all the little threads were coming together.”

  “Oh? What did Joan want?”

  “A lot of questions about Arthur. She thinks she’s on to something.”

  “What sort of questions?”

  “Funny questions. What color were his eyes, for instance. I told her I couldn’t remember. Then she wanted his unpublished number.”

  “Did you give it to her?”

  “I wasn’t sure whether I should or not. But then I thought—why not? Because—” And Daisy reaches out and touches Essie’s knee, “Because I know that Arthur will never talk to her, Essie. I’m sure of that. I know Arthur very well. Arthur may be a lot of things, but he’s also a man of his word. There’s no way Arthur will ever see her, or talk to her, or tell her anything.”

  “His unpublished number.”

  “She can dial it as often as she wants, he won’t come to the phone. He won’t even come to the phone for me. I have to leave elaborate messages. Then he calls me back.” She laughs. “From pay phones. His pockets are always full of quarters.” Then she leans closer. “But I wanted you to know about this because, you know, Joan has always been a troublemaker. You’ve had enough trouble, Essie. I don’t want you to have any more. So watch out for Joan.”

  “Thank you, Daisy. And if she calls you again—”

  “She’s learned all she’s going to learn from me. But now, tell me why you wanted to see me.”

  Essie rises, a little stiffly, from the loveseat, and, addressing the Douglas Chandor portrait, says, “He wasn’t very generous to you.”