The Auerbach Will

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  Then, a little wearily, she put her glasses on her nose again, picked up the paper once more, and, skipping through the long story, came to the end.

  “… and the most exciting part of the plans,” Mr. Auerbach said, “is that the pivotal idea came not from myself, nor from any officer or employee of our company, but from my son Joshua, who is just sixteen years old.”

  Essie leaped to her feet, the newspaper crushed to her bosom, and ran to the window. What did she expect to see? Only the facades of buildings across the street. Whom did she expect to hail? The towers of the Queensborough Bridge? Is it possible, she thinks—is it just possible—that in this one good child she has managed somehow to capture all the best qualities of both Jake and Charles? And none of their worst? Is it possible?

  Twenty-seven

  As Jake grew older, he seemed to grow calmer, less impatient, particularly with this son. Mogie had become a moody, difficult young man, something of a loner. After the war, he had come home from Washington, full of international secrets which he would not reveal, though he often spoke intimately of the world leaders he had worked for—“Franklin” Roosevelt, “Harry” Truman, “Joe” Stalin, “Charlie” de Gaulle, “Hap,” and “Ike,” and “Doug” and “Dickie,” as though he had been on a first-name basis with them all, and perhaps he had. He had not married, nor did he show much interest in the opposite sex as far as Essie could see (she did not know, of course, about the collection of photographs he kept in a locked file drawer, in a folder simply marked “M,” for Masturbation). He had moved back into his parents’ apartment on Park Avenue, where he spent much of his time in his room, listening to his records of classical music, reading his art books, and writing scraps of sentences and bits of verse in his Italianate script. Though he had been offered a position at Eaton & Cromwell, he had shown no interest in joining the company. He continued to see his analyst three times a week.

  Josh was much more open and outgoing. The trips and tours of factories and warehouses that had always been promised to Prince, but had never been forthcoming, now took place for Josh. It is as though, Essie thought, Jake realizes that he himself made some mistakes in the past. Whenever it was possible, he took Josh to visit the construction sites of the new suburban stores that were rising across the country, and he had already begun to talk of Josh eventually taking over the company when the time came.

  “Wherever we go, he keeps telling everybody that all this was my idea,” Josh said to his mother. “It was more like—just a suggestion.”

  “Well, let’s hope it works,” Essie said. “If it doesn’t, there’ll be hell to pay.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “If this suburban move pays off, you’ll get all the credit. If it doesn’t, you’ll get all the blame.”

  “Golly, I hadn’t thought of that.”

  But of course it had paid off and, by 1950, Essie could read with equanimity, in an article about the “Fortune 500” companies, that her husband’s was the tenth largest in the land, and that Jacob Auerbach’s personal fortune was estimated at six hundred million dollars. Where did they get such figures? Essie wondered. They probably just made them up. Someone—was it Jake himself?—had once said to her, “Any man who knows how rich he is isn’t very rich.” But there was no question that Jake was very rich.

  “Eisenhower is my type of President,” he had said to her. It was not long after Josh had graduated from Princeton, and the same year that Jacob Auerbach himself had been given an honorary degree, a Doctorate of Humane Letters, from the same university. That summer, Josh had formally joined Eaton’s, where he had worked for the past four summers at various jobs, wanting to learn the business, as he put it, from the bottom up.

  “We’re lucky to be rid of Roosevelt and Truman, who wanted to sell us down the river to the Russians,” Jake said. “What do you think, Essie? Now that the Eisenhowers have invited us to dinner at the White House, what if I were to call Ike and say that I’d like to bring Josh along?”

  “Is that done, Jake? With an invitation to the White House?”

  “Who the hell cares if it’s been done or not? That’s no reason why I can’t do it.”

  “Mogie knows Eisenhower quite well, I think.”

  “But Mogie didn’t get an invitation. I’m going to get one for Josh. It would be a hell of an experience for the boy. Besides, if Ike wants me to dinner, it’s obvious he wants something out of me. If he wants something from me, I can ask a favor of him.”

  “Then do it, Jake,” she said.

  “Will you wear your emeralds, Essie?”

  “If you like.”

  “I’ve always loved you in your emeralds.…”

  “Cecilia’s dead.”

  “Ah, Charles. I’m sorry.”

  But she was unprepared for his stricken look of grief, the ears that seemed to stand in his eyes.

  “You did everything you could for her,” she said. “She had he best care in the world.”

  “It’s not that.”

  Then what was it? “I should think that there’d be a sense of elease. From the burden—the drinking. In and out of hospials all the time. What she put you through. Poor Cecilia. I say hat even though I found her the most impossible woman—” Jut suddenly she knew that she should not go on. He was staring at her, not angrily, but almost incomprehendingly, as hough she had failed to grasp some essential ingredient in Charles’s relationship with Cecilia, and now all at once she knew what it was. Josh had put his finger on it years ago, but Essie had not really thought of it since. But Josh had been right.

  “Charles,” she said quietly, “I’m sorry. You know, we’re very much alike. I know I’ll weep when Jake goes.”

  “Yes,” he said. “And so will I.”

  She came and sat beside him, and cradled his head in her arms, the way her mother had done when she was a little girl and needed comforting.

  It had been in the early 1950s, and Cecilia had been briefly home from one of her sanatoriums. Josh and his pretty Katie Coughlin, whom he had known since her days at Smith, had just announced their engagement, and Cecilia had wanted to give a small dinner for them all at the house on Ninetieth street.

  “Is she really up to it, Charles?” Essie had asked him.

  “I don’t know, but she wants to do it, and we’ve got to let her try.”

  The evening had begun pleasantly enough, but, during the cocktail hour—though Cecilia did not appear to be drinking—she became increasingly agitated and distracted, and suddenly she ran out of the room and up the stairs. There was the sound of a door slamming.

  In the awkward little silence that followed, Charles whispered instructions to his butler. The dinner table was quickly reset, Cecilia’s place and chair were removed, and the others sat down at the table and proceeded as though the hostess were still there. She did not reappear.

  After dinner, there were cheerful toasts to the young couple, and the evening ended with singing around the piano.

  Driving home with Jake and Essie, Josh and his fiancée sat on the jump seats facing them, and Josh said, “Isn’t it funny how Uncle Charles changes when she’s not around? He becomes the life of the party.”

  “It’s tragic,” Essie said.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Josh said. “I think he needs a sick Cecilia.”

  “Why on earth do you say that?”

  “She gives him independence. That’s what Uncle Charles is all about. If she were a nice, normal corporate wife, she’d tie him down. Charles Wilmont is essentially a loner.”

  “Parlor psychologist,” Katie said. “Then why did he marry her?”

  “Because he knew she was a woman who would leave him alone.”

  “But surely he didn’t bargain for this,” Essie said.

  “Intuitively, I bet he did. I’ve watched him at the office. There are two sides to Charles Wilmont. One is a nice, easygoing, jolly, considerate fellow. But there’s also a dark side—a very private side, that he doesn’t let many pe
ople see.”

  Well, Essie thought, that much was true.

  “He doesn’t want to make any deep commitments.”

  “Well,” Jake said, “he’s certainly committed to our company.”

  “Sure, but a company is a company. It’s not a humar being.”

  “You’re making Charles sound like a very cold person,’ Essie said.

  “Not at all. After all, don’t the most decent people always have something to hide? Isn’t that better than somebody who just lets everything about himself just spill out all over the place? I’ll take a person with secrets over a person with no secrets any day. More interesting.”

  “Do you have secrets, Josh?” Katie asked him.

  “Of course!” he laughed.

  “Well, I just think that Cecilia is a tragic case,” Essie said, “and that Charles handles it as best he can, like a true gentleman.”

  “And—funny thing. I never noticed until tonight at dinner. Uncle Charles is left-handed.”

  “Like you,” Katie said.

  And so, she thought now, it was true, Cecilia had meant something to him after all. He was, after all, a man who needed props, buttresses, and Cecilia had been one of his. So was Jake. So was Josh. So was she. Was he, then, so different from herself? Jake was one of her props, as was Charles, as was Josh, as was Daisy. How could she have been so insensitive? With Cecilia’s death, one of Charles’s props had simply been knocked away.

  Props. When they begin to go, one by one, that is when you know that you are growing old.

  Doctor Ornstein had come to her in the library of the apartment where she sat waiting, and said to her, “He’s going fast. I think you’d better come.” This was in the winter of 1965. Jake Auerbach was eighty-one.

  “Call the children,” she said to Mary Farrell. And then, “Phone Daisy Stevens and tell her to come.” The king is dying, she thought. At Edward VII’s deathbed, Alexandra had sent for Mrs. Keppel. Journeys end in lovers meeting.

  She had been the first at his bedside in the big, semidarkened bedroom where the private nurses hovered and whispered and rechecked the levels of serums in their syringes. He seemed huge in the bed, too huge to be dying, his eyes closed, his breathing hard. Essie sat beside his bed and covered his hand with hers. In about ten minutes, Daisy arrived from Sixty-first Street, and whispered the news that Joan and Mogie and Josh were on their way. Babette was in Florida, and had been telephoned. At the sound of Daisy’s voice, Jake opened his eyes, and when he saw her there he waved her away, whispering, “No … no. I want to see Essie alone.” With a little sob, Daisy turned and walked quickly out of the room.

  Not knowing what to do next, Essie said, “I’m here, Jake,” and bent and kissed his forehead.

  He said something she could not understand.

  “What?” she said putting her ear to his lips.

  “Tell me the secret.”

  “What secret, Jake?”

  “The money. Where did you get it? Not in a sweepstakes.”

  She laughed a little wildly. She had almost forgotten about that, it was all so long ago. “No,” she said. “Not in a sweepstakes. It was my mother’s savings.”

  “Your … mother’s … savings,” he repeated. He frowned and closed his eyes. “Hard to believe.”

  And so he had died, it seemed, not knowing whether she had told him the truth or not.

  “It’s true, Jake,” she told him, while a nurse, with a large stopwatch in her hand, checked his wrist for a pulse. “I swear to God to you it’s true!”

  But he did not answer her.

  And the next morning, in all the newspapers, there were the front-page headlines—a full-page obituary in the New York Times—the great Jacob Auerbach was dead. Essie has saved all the clippings. They are filed away in Mary’s files. Essie could show them to you, if you like.

  Joan Auerbach’s marriage to Richard McAllister was a quiet ceremony, attended only by Joan’s daughter Karen, and performed by a Justice of the Peace at City Hall. Richard McAllister was described as “a journalist and writer for liberal causes,” and, within weeks after that, Joan announced her plans to start up a new afternoon daily newspaper in New York. She had not yet received her full inheritance but, in anticipation of it, she had been able to secure several large loans from banks. Babette, too, had invested some money in Joan’s project, and so had Essie, who had decided that Joan needed more than men and marriages to keep her occupied and out of trouble.

  “New York needs a bright, young, informed and liberal voice to balance the stuffy, self-important and generally conservative Times,” she told a news conference which she had called, as the new publisher of the New York Express, with Richard McAllister, its new editor.

  “How do you justify a liberal, or generally left-wing political stance with your own family’s conservative tradition, Mrs. McAllister?” a reporter asked her. “Your father was one of America’s great capitalists, was he not?”

  “Incidentally, on the masthead I will be identified as Joan Auerbach,” Joan said. “To emphasize that the Express will be much more than a Mom and Pop operation.”

  There was laughter, and then Joan continued with her answer to the question.

  This is what the newspapers printed:

  “While it is true,” said Mrs. McAllister, who will use the “professional” name of Joan Auerbach, “that my late father achieved great wealth in his lifetime, and was a longtime supporter of Republican causes, it should not be assumed that I have spent my entire life surrounded by luxury. On the contrary. When my younger sister and I were growing up, we were dirt poor. I had no toys whatever, and I went to school in rags and tattered garments. Our house was little more than a hovel. It had no heat, and I was often starved for food as well as affection, since Mother was far too busy keeping house and caring for a husband and growing family to give any attention to the needs of a little girl. In those days, our father worked in a menial position in a store owned by some cousins in New York. Quite often, there was not enough money to put bread on the table, much less to pay for a new pair of shoes for a little girl who had outgrown her old ones. Even in the dead of winter I went about barefoot. To earn a few pennies of spending money, my sister and I set up a small stand at a streetcorner to sell fruit juices. I did not own a pretty dress until I was sixteen. It is hard for my two younger brothers, who were born after my father started on his road to great success, to imagine how different my early life was from theirs. But I am perhaps fortunate to have seen the other side of the coin, and to know what it was like to be poor. I can champion the underdog because I was the underdog, and have experienced poverty—abject, grinding poverty.”

  “Jake must be spinning in his grave,” Essie said to Josh when he read the story aloud to her.

  “You’re feathering your paddle, Essie,” Charles said to her. “We’re going around in circles.” They had gone together to the Adirondacks that summer, and planned to spend the month of August there, just the two of them. It would turn out to be the last time they would spend there, and the following year Essie would put the place on the market.

  “Is that the story of our lives, Charles? Going around in circles?”

  “If you’ll just paddle, Essie,” he called back to her from the front of the canoe. “Just paddle, and we’ll go straight.”

  “So now you’re the new president of Eaton’s,” she said. “How does it feel?”

  “I’m just holding it in stewardship for Josh. Next year, I’m going to ask them to bump me upstairs—board chairman, or something. Something mostly honorary.”

  “Is Josh ready for it, Charles?”

  “That kid’s been ready since he was thirteen. He’s married to the company now.”

  “Well, he’s married to Katie, and their son.”

  “I mean married to it the way I’ve been married to it all these years.”

  “Married? And not to—” She left the question unfinished, and they paddled in silence again across the smooth wat
er.

  “Shall we have our picnic in the little cove where we saw the deer?”

  “Yes, that would be nice.”

  “You’re feathering again,” he warned her.

  “I should have sat in front, and let you sit in back.” Then she said, “We could get married now, you know.”

  He rested his paddle across his knees, turned and looked back at her. “Do you think so?”

  “Well, we could. We’re both free now.”

  “Don’t you think we’re a little too old for that?”

  “Oh, people get married at our age,” she said. “Look at Averell Harriman.”

  “Hmm,” he said. “But wouldn’t your children—wouldn’t they object?”

  “We’re free to do what we want, aren’t we? Without consulting them?”

  “No. They’d worry about their inheritance. There’d be a lot of unpleasantness.”

  “But you and I certainly aren’t going to have more children, for goodness sake! Why should they worry?”

  They were floating now, not far from shore, both paddles idle.

  “But suppose you were to die first,” he said, “and decide to leave everything to me. And then suppose I decided to leave everything to a cat hospital. That’s what they’d worry about.”

  “That’s silly, Charles!”

  “Still, it would be the first thing that would come into their minds.”

  “Well, I don’t care. I still think it would be nice.”

  “What would be nice?”

  “To be married to you.”

  “I see,” he said.

  “There’s nothing standing between us now—not Jake, not Cecilia. Not even Daisy, to protect us—whatever it was you meant by that.”

  “Don’t you know, Essie?”

  “No, unless you meant that Jake—knew?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did he, Charles?”

  “Yes. Knew. Or at least suspected. I’m quite sure of it. He must have. But Daisy was his Achilles’ heel, the chink in his armor. As long as I knew about Daisy, as long as Daisy stayed in the picture, there was nothing that Jake Auerbach could do to touch me. He couldn’t touch me, or do anything about us. Daisy was always my ace in the hole, my little bargaining chip.”