Sins of the Fathers (18 page)

The excitement hurt. Smothering it behind my most impassive expression I said neutrally: ‘If you’d do anything to make me
happy, Cornelius, then let’s please revert to the agreement we reached last April. I know that you love me better than anyone
else, and the knowledge itself is enough for me. There’s no need for you to demonstrate that love physically so you mustn’t
feel under any obligation or compulsion to do so.’

He at once got out of bed and moved rapidly to the door.

‘Cornelius—’

‘It’s okay,’ he said. ‘I’ve been stupid. I’m sorry I bothered you. Goodnight.’

The door closed and I was alone again. Immediately I turned out the light so that I could not see the empty space where he
had slept beside me, but beyond the window the dawn was breaking and when I could no longer ignore the deserted bed my courage
failed me and I began to cry.

[3]

Sometimes I laugh at the soap operas when they present a grand passion as glamorous, creating an exciting but serene world
filled with the music of soaring violins and the vistas of never-ending golden sunsets. Grand passions aren’t like that at
all. They’re terrifying and destructive, razing homes, smashing lives and ripping apart all semblance of civilized behaviour,
and beneath the gleaming veneer of compulsive passion is the dark sordid stratum of other people’s suffering and loss.

I married my first husband Ralph Foxworth when I was seventeen in order to escape from an unhappy home. When I was twenty
and five months pregnant with my second son I met Cornelius. Three days later I went to live with him, and by the time Andrew
entered the world I had already embarked on my new marriage.

I was still very young. I thought that if Cornelius and I loved one another enough the golden sunsets and soaring violins
would still be waiting for us when we emerged from the shadow of my divorce. I
thought I could bear losing both my sons to Ralph in the custody battle once I began having more children, and I thought that
so long as I had Cornelius we would easily survive any misfortune which might overtake us in the future.

But there was no golden sunset. The violins played lusciously for a short time and then were still. I see life very differently
now.

I am not a religious person, although of course I go to church at Easter and Christmas when the event is an Episcopalian social
occasion, but I have come to believe that there are certain natural laws which operate in human affairs, just as there are
natural laws which regulate the world around us. When I was small I learnt that the sea is governed by tides; if the tide
comes in, it must also go out. When I was older I learnt that grand passions too operate under similar implacable laws; if
you exchange your husband and children for paradise, you should not be altogether surprised if paradise turns out to be more
– or in my case very much less – than you bargained for.

It took me some time to realize this since the first two and a half years of our marriage were exquisitely happy, marred only
by my private grief that I never saw my sons, but on the seventh of September 1933 – the anniversary of that day never passes
without me feeling ill with the weight of past unhappiness – Cornelius was informed that he had become sterile as the result
of an attack of mumps suffered two years earlier. We were hardly surprised when this discovery affected our intimate life
and we accepted that we would need time to adjust to the situation, but it never occurred to us that our marriage was to be
permanently crippled. We stumbled on awkwardly for a while. At last Cornelius overcame his difficulties but before long, inexplicably,
they recurred. He saw various doctors, all of whom told him that there was no physical reason why he should not have a normal
sexual relationship with me, but this unanimous diagnosis failed to result in the disappearance of our troubles. Cornelius
became increasingly awkward, I became increasingly nervous, and even on those rare occasions when we managed to consummate
the marriage the moment was always too brief and too burdened with anxiety to give us more than a tantalizing glimpse of the
pleasures we had taken for granted in the past.

Realizing that our childlessness was at the root of the problem we discussed the possibility of adoption, but the idea was
discarded when Ralph remarried and gave me generous access to my boys. Soon afterwards Cornelius won better access to Vicky
too so that we were able to see all three children at Christmas and Easter as well as during the month of August which we
always spent at Bar Harbor. In 1938 I was
just telling myself severely that it was unreasonable to want to see the boys more often when I was already so fortunate,
when Ralph was killed in the airship disaster at Lakewood, New Jersey, and Sebastian and Andrew, now aged nine and seven,
came to live with us permanently.

Matters at once improved out of all recognition. I was so happy to have the chance to be a full-time mother at last, and Cornelius,
perhaps feeling that I no longer minded our childlessness, overcame his difficulties for a time. We never recaptured the perfection
of the early days, but we probably managed as well as the average husband and wife who had been married for seven years and
the grinding awkwardness between us had dissolved. Then in 1941 Cornelius succeeded in winning sole custody of his daughter
and Vicky came to live with us.

I can think of a number of reasons why Vicky dislocated our marriage, but I can never decide which reason is correct. Perhaps
the damage was caused by a combination of these reasons, but whatever the cause the one indisputable fact was that our marriage
once more entered difficult times.

Perhaps the main trouble was that I had not anticipated how difficult Vicky was going to be. I knew her well by that time,
but when she had visited us in the past she had always been on her best behaviour. Once she came to live with us matters were
very different. Of course one cannot expect children to be on their best behaviour all the time, just as one cannot expect
a stepmother’s job to be easy, but I had underestimated the time, patience and sheer mental effort required to help a troubled
ten-year-old settle down in a new environment. Vicky was pert, rebellious and determined to dramatize her situation by classing
me as the wicked stepmother. I was equally determined to make allowances for her since the custody struggles had been bitter
and the mother, an irresponsible nymphomaniac, had obviously no idea how to raise a child properly, but my nerves became frayed
and I soon found I was under considerable strain.

I wanted to love Vicky. I had always longed for a daughter, particularly a little girl who looked like Cornelius, so it was
a great disappointment to me when Vicky proved so different from the ideal daughter I wanted so much. Naturally I concealed
my disappointment; I thought I had concealed it perfectly, but perhaps Cornelius sensed my feelings and resented them. Or
perhaps he felt guilty that he had imposed another woman’s daughter on me instead of giving me a daughter of my own. Or perhaps
the strained atmosphere in the family caused subconscious tensions in his mind. As I have already said, I can
think of more than one reason why Vicky should have dislocated our marriage, but whatever the reason was the dislocation now
showed signs of becoming not merely a temporary but a permanent feature of our domestic landscape.

It was hard to cope. My one preoccupation was to present a normal front to the children so that they should remain untouched
by our problems, but in 1945 came the incident which almost terminated our marriage. Vicky was fourteen and a half, Sebastian
sixteen. I cannot describe this incident except to say that I was and still am convinced of Sebastian’s innocence. Vicky was
maladjusted about sexual matters, thanks to that disgraceful mother of hers, and although I tried to talk to her sensibly
about male behaviour in certain circumstances, she was too hysterical to listen. Cornelius was useless; he was incapable of
being sensible where Vicky was concerned, and in a flash he was siding with her against me when I tried to defend Sebastian.
Since I could not forgive him for some of the things he said about my son and he could not forgive me for some of the things
I said about his daughter, it was hardly surprising that we became estranged and for a whole year made no attempt to sleep
together.

But then he came back to me. He said he had been so miserable that he had asked Jake Reischman to lend him one of his mistresses
– it was typical of Jake that he should have had more than one to offer – but the incident had been so sordid that he couldn’t
repeat it. He said he loved me and wanted me back. I went back to him.

We were happy for a little while, but it didn’t last, I guess we both knew it wouldn’t last, but oh, the pain. I can’t be
cold and crisp and detached any more, it’s beyond me, I’m so unhappy. I can’t describe the pain, it was there all the time,
soaking through me, and when I could bear it no more I went to the doctor and said please,
please
give me some tranquillizers, and when he asked me why I was so upset I didn’t say: ‘My husband can hardly ever make love
to me.’ I said: ‘My husband and I have no children.’

‘But Mrs Van Zale!’ he said amazed. ‘You have three children, your two sons and your stepdaughter!’

‘I mean the other children,’ I said. ‘All the children we never had.’ But I could not describe the loss to him. I could not
tell him that Cornelius and I had planned to have seven children – yes, seven – one daughter and six sons (‘One more than
the Rockefellers!’ we had often said laughing) – and we had planned their birthdays and named them and plotted their careers
– ‘Oh, it was just a game,’ I said to the first psychiatrist, ‘just a way of making me feel better because I missed my boys
so much.’ ‘No, it wasn’t a game,’ I said to the second psychiatrist.
‘It was real, they were all real, I knew what they looked like, and then suddenly one day they were gone and I didn’t know
– still don’t know – how to bear the loss, I still miss them so much, whenever I think of them I can’t endure their nonexistence
…’

The psychiatrist was kind but he didn’t really understand.

‘I was so good at having children,’ I said as I watched him write me a new prescription for tranquillizers. ‘I’m not a very
special person, not clever or gifted, but when I gave birth to Sebastian I felt for the first time in my life that I was
someone
, a real person, Alicia Blaise Foxworth, talented, brilliant, successful … I would have felt like that when Andrew was born
too except that I knew I was going to have to give him up so I tried hard not to be emotionally involved in the birth. But
I was. I cried and cried when I was parted from Andrew but I had to stop because I didn’t want Cornelius to know. I had to
shut up all my grief inside me and pretend not to mind. Sometimes I think I’ve been doing nothing else all these years except
shutting up the grief and pretending, pretending, pretending … I must never let Cornelius know I mind, you see, because it
would hurt him so much, and I love Cornelius, I couldn’t bear to hurt him. I’d rather die than let him know how much I mind
our childlessness—’

But that was a lie. I lived and I let him know. On the sixth of April 1949, the unthinkable happened, my self-control broke
down and the fragile relationship which we had preserved with such difficulty for so many years was finally wrecked beyond
repair.

[4]

The trouble began when Vicky, bent on melodrama as usual, embarked on a ridiculous elopement with a beach-boy and the quiet
façade of our troubled family life again cracked wide apart. Cornelius could do nothing but ask in despair where we had gone
wrong, and when he looked at me as if I were the cause of Vicky’s selfish irresponsibility I had trouble restraining myself
from pointing out that the entire disaster had arisen because he had spoilt her from the cradle to compensate himself for
all the children he had never had. However I think this home truth must have been obvious even to him. Certainly the situation
seemed to fuel his guilt towards me and we were already on the borders of a vast new estrangement when I discovered that he
was secretly planning to marry Vicky to Sam Keller.

Sam was so like a brother to Cornelius that I always thought of
him as my brother-in-law. Since he was a man who never let a woman feel unappreciated I found it easy to be friends with him,
but I knew very well that the charm he lavished on me was due entirely to the fact that I was Cornelius’ wife. If Cornelius
had ever divorced me Sam would never have given me another glance because Sam defined the world only in terms of what was
important to Cornelius. He was one of those men who gravitate instinctively to sources of great wealth and power; though born
neither to wealth nor power themselves they have an infallible instinct for latching on to the right patron and sticking with
him through thick and thin. Too clever to be merely a lackey and too shrewd not to take every possible advantage of his friendship
with Cornelius, Sam was no mere sycophantic hanger-on but a formidable force in his own right.

Of course he was the wrong husband for Vicky.

I knew he could not love her just as I knew he was capable of marrying her to please Cornelius. I am deeply opposed to men
marrying girls they don’t love. My first marriage taught me in no uncertain way about the misery waiting for a girl in a loveless
relationship, and although I secretly longed for Vicky to leave home I found myself unable to sanction the idea of Sam as
a husband for her, particularly since there was someone else far more suitable who could offer her all the love she would
never receive from Sam.

Sebastian had always loved Vicky. There was nothing unnatural about it. They were not related by blood and although my marriage
to Cornelius had made them stepbrother and stepsister they had not been brought up together from the cradle. Personally I
thought it was more unnatural for Sam to marry Vicky since she had been taught from birth to regard him as an uncle.