Sins of the Fathers (35 page)

‘Yes, you are,’ said Kevin, ‘but that’s okay because if you can accept me as I am then I can accept you as you are, even though
you’re a sonofabitch.’

We shook hands very solemnly and swore eternal friendship.

It’s funny how simple and straightforward life seems when you’re drunk.

Less than six weeks later we were no longer on speaking terms.

[1]

The trouble began when Kevin received a subpoena to appear before the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities. We were moving
towards the end of 1952, and in the Senate McCarthy was at his zenith. Afterwards I blamed the whole disaster on McCarthy.
If it hadn’t been for his questionable success in winkling the communists out of the woodwork of government, the House Committee
might have remained as it had been before those fatal years of the late forties and early fifties, a backwater for political
has-beens with racial prejudices.

However with McCarthy on the rampage in the Senate the House Committee saw the opportunity to increase their power and by
1952 they had turned their attention to people in the arts, either communists or radicals, who could provide them with information
about the hidden reds in America. Kevin had never been a communist, but like so many writers and artists he had had radical
views in the past and had often mixed with people whose political views could be considered questionable. So it was not surprising
that the Committee, scrounging around for new sources of information, should select him to testify on the subject of his past
and present acquaintances.

In spite of this it was still a shock when one evening Teresa met me with the news that Kevin had received his subpoena. And
it was an even bigger shock when she added that he had every intention of taking the Fifth Amendment and refusing to testify
against his friends.

I went to see Kevin at once. I pointed out that any attempt he might make to take the Fifth would result in him being blacklisted;
no one would dare to produce his plays and his career would be ruined.

‘You could even be jailed for contempt,’ I added. ‘Look what happened to Dashiell Hammett – a writer who refused to testify!
Kevin,
your only hope of saving yourself is to tell the Committee everything they want to know. It’s done all the time nowadays,
and your friends will understand that you’ve got no choice.’

‘But Neil,’ said Kevin, ‘the whole point is that I do have a choice. It is really so impossible for you to see that?’

We argued for some time but got nowhere. He claimed that unless someone took a stand against the Committee, the government
might soon decide to start chasing Jews and homosexuals as well as communists. I claimed that the inauguration of Eisenhower
as president would see the initiation of a new approach to the Cold War with the result that communist persecution would no
longer be politically necessary. ‘So whether or not you sacrifice your career for idealistic liberal principles, it won’t
make one blind bit of difference to the future of America,’ I concluded. ‘It’ll be irrelevant. If you ruin yourself you’ll
have ruined yourself for a cause which exists only in the minds of you and your fellow-intellectuals.’

But he couldn’t see it. We continued to argue until at last he said: ‘Neil, I don’t want this to degenerate into a serious
quarrel. You go your way and let me go mine. It’s my life, after all, and my career. Not yours.’

I said no more, but of course I was determined not to give up the fight on his behalf, and two days later I invented some
business excuse, stepped aboard my private plane and was flown at top speed to Washington.

Luckily I didn’t have to go as far as the Oval Office although I would have gone there if it had been necessary. I just went
to my favourite Congressman, the one most heavily involved with the Committee on UnAmerican Activities, and after reminding
him who had recently helped extricate him from a budding scandal (why are politicians always so reckless about graft?) I said
it would be sad if his little problem were to surface again so soon after his re-election. I then remarked that it would make
me very happy if the Committee could forget all about the New York playwright Kevin Daly who had never been a card carrying
party member and whom I personally knew to be a good loyal American, and I’m glad to say the Congressman was very understanding
about the whole matter, so understanding that after a round of handshakes I was assured I had nothing left to worry about.

Feeling very pleased with myself I flew home to New York and went straight to Teresa to announce that Kevin’s problem with
the Committee had been unequivocably solved.

In delight Teresa phoned Kevin but he hung up on her. I thought
that was odd, but supposed he was too overcome with relief to speak, and when I later found him waiting for me at my home
on Fifth Avenue I naturally assumed he had come to celebrate his reprieve. His towering rage, which exploded as soon as we
were alone together in the library, was such a shock that I nearly dropped the bottle of Wild Turkey bourbon which I stocked
specially for his visits.

‘You goddamned interfering sonofabitch, how dare you try and play God with my life!’

‘Kevin! What do you mean? You had a problem and I fixed it, that’s all! Why are you so angry?’

‘I didn’t ask you to play fairy godmother!’ Kevin yelled. ‘I didn’t ask you to go waving the magic wand of your corrupt political
influence! I asked you to leave me alone so that I could take a good hard slam at the Committee – I had lawyers who were willing
to help me, I had liberal backers, I had people from the press on my side—’

‘You’d all have come to grief, and anyway I consider I had a moral duty to stop you from wrecking your career—’

‘If I want to wreck my career I’ll wreck it! It’s no goddamned business of yours!’

‘Well, okay, but you might at least be grateful that I—’

‘
Grateful
! I’m supposed to be grateful because you get a kick out of waving your power around as if it were a Colt .45 – or any other
phallic symbol I could name?’

‘Look pal,’ I said, setting down the unopened bottle of bourbon with a crash, ‘get this straight and save the psychological
crap for one of your dumb plays. At great trouble and expense and even risk to myself I did you the biggest possible favour,
and if you think I got some kind of degenerate sex-kick out of it, you must be out of your perverted pro-communist mind!’

Without a word Kevin turned and walked to the door.

‘Kevin!’ My legs were moving. There was cold sweat on my back. Something was happening to my breathing but I paid no attention
because I was so upset. ‘Kevin—’ I just managed to grab his arm before he opened the door but he shoved me away.

‘Fuck off! If you were any other guy you wouldn’t still be in one piece!’

‘But Kevin, I’m your friend!’

‘Not any more,’ said Kevin violently, and slammed the library door in my face.

[2]

‘… and he slammed the door in my face,’ I said to Jake half an hour later. I was three blocks north of my house in the library
of the Reischman mansion. Vast olive-green drapes covered vast ugly windows. A dim light in the ceiling far above us shone
limpidly on the untranslated German classics and the masterpieces of English literature. Jake and I were sitting facing each
other in leather armchairs poised on either side of an immense fireplace. Jake was drinking Johnnie Walker scotch. I had by
that time progressed to neat brandy.

‘God, I feel so mad!’ I said, trying to sound angry but only succeeding in sounding miserable. ‘I mean, how ungrateful can
you get? I only wanted to help him!’

‘Come, Neil,’ said Jake, giving me one of his thin smiles, ‘you’re not really that naïve.’

‘I only wanted to help him!’ I repeated stubbornly, but I knew what he meant. My misery broadened to encompass my shame.

‘Oh hell, okay, maybe I did it to impress him. I certainly enjoyed impressing Teresa. Maybe I did it because I wanted to prove
something to him … that I wasn’t vulnerable … not someone to be pitied – no, forget I said that, I take it back. But I did
do it too because I wanted to help him, Jake! My motives weren’t all bad! I did mean well, I swear it!’

‘Well, never mind your motives now. The important thing is that you should learn from your mistakes. You do realize, I hope,
what your mistakes were? Number one: never put your friends in your debt by a naked display of power. Your friends are only
your friends because they like to kid themselves that underneath all those millions you’re as ordinary as they are, and you
let them kid themselves because you want to think that you have friends who like you in spite of the money. But if you go
around manipulating their lives, no matter how altruistic your motives, you destroy this mutual illusion with the result that
neither of you can continue to live comfortably with the truth. And the truth is, of course, that you’re not ordinary, you
have a surplus of the commodity most men secretly want – power – and you have more control over them than they can psychologically
stand.’

‘Yes. Right. Oh God, how could I have been such a—’

‘Your second mistake,’ said Jake, lighting a new cigarette from the butt which was dying between his fingers, ‘was your failure
to grasp Kevin’s own attitude to his dilemma. Just because you can’t understand it doesn’t mean it’s some kind of grand intellectual
delusion, yet you behaved as if he’d proved himself certifiable. No wonder Kevin got so
angry. What you were really doing was insulting his view of life – or reality, if you prefer – by imposing your will on his.’

‘Hell, yes, I guess I was. But I didn’t mean to! All I wanted—’

‘Yes, we know what you wanted. Your third mistake—’

‘Christ, is there another?’ I felt close to complete despair.

‘—was to rant on like a fundamentalist preacher from the Bible Belt about your so-called moral duty. Try and be a little more
sophisticated, Neil! My God, twenty-five years in New York and you’re still capable of acting like a farm-boy from Ohio!’

‘But I was sincere when I talked about moral duty!’

‘Sincerity is nearly always undiplomatic and very often disastrous. Anyway I question your sincerity. Maybe you should too.
Your talk of moral duty was just an excuse for interfering, and you’ve already admitted that your motives for helping Kevin
weren’t as pristine as you’d like to believe.’

‘Yes, but …’ I sighed. I felt tired and muddled and dispirited, and Jake, seeing this, stood up, patted me on the shoulder
and refilled my glass of brandy.

‘Relax, Neil. No one ever acts for the purest possible motives. You tried to do what you genuinely believed to be right, and
an impure motive or two doesn’t alter that basic fact. You were misguided, the result was a disaster, but I accept that you
were fundamentally well-intentioned.’

‘And you sympathize?’

‘Of course. I know how fond you are of Kevin. I know how much it means to have a friend who’s known you from the beginning.’

I experienced an enormous surge of relief and gratitude. When all was said and done there was no friend as close to me as
Jake. He alone understood the problems of wealth and isolation because his position was so similar to my own.

‘How can I make it up with Kevin?’ I said at last, worrying over the problem. ‘Shall I write him a letter? If I call he’ll
just hang up.’ I had an inspiration. ‘I could write him a letter
by hand
. That would show him I was sincere. He knows my correspondence is always typed by secretaries.’

‘I should leave him well alone. Any move you make towards a reconciliation will probably encourage him to think you’re exercising
your power again, and he’ll stay hostile. The first move’s got to come from him.’

‘But it may never come!’

‘Possibly, but if you make big mistakes you must expect to pay for them.’

‘“For every wrong some day you’ll pay”?’ I said, quoting a Hank Williams song. ‘You don’t truly believe that, do you, Jake?’

Jake thought for a moment. ‘No.’

We laughed together, two cynical New Yorkers with an unusual amount in common

‘How’s Vicky?’ said Jake as I stood up to go.

‘Just fine, judging from her letters. How are your kids?’

‘Okay.’ Jake never seemed interested in his children, and as the conversation veered at last towards our domestic lives I
felt that strange slender barrier rise between us to sever our lines of communication.

‘How’s Amy?’ I said, mechanically completing the ritual of family inquiries.

‘Fine … How’s Alicia?’

‘Oh, she’s just great! She’s taking much more of an interest in life these days with her charities and that flower-arranging
course she gives to the Junior League. I’m very pleased. I was kind of worried about her around the time Vicky got married.
It’s hard for women when all the kids have left home.’

‘Sure.’

He came out with me to see me off. Leaving the library we traversed a huge gloomy atrium and our footsteps echoed eerily on
the marble surrounding the ornamental pool. The gilded pipes of the organ were lost in the shadows of the domed ceiling.

‘What do you think of the latest shenanigans of the anti-trust case?’ he said. ‘Judge Medina must be on his knees by this
time.’

I responded automatically to his move to restore the communication lines. ‘It’s my one regret Van Zale’s wasn’t named as a
defendant in the case along with the other seventeen investment banking houses,’ I said. ‘I’d have told prosecuting counsel
a thing or two!’

‘Think of the legal bills you’d have to pay. And the time you’d have to waste.’

‘True.’ We paused by the mock-medieval front door and shook hands.

‘Thanks a lot, Jake. You’re a true friend. I appreciate it.’

‘Good night, Neil. And remember: soft-pedal the power in front of your friends, reserve the phrase “moral duty” for discussions
with your local minister, and try not to act all the time as if you strongly suspect God is a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant.’

‘I don’t suspect it, I know it!’ I retorted, feeling very much better, and heard his laughter ring out behind me as he gently
closed the door.

[3]

I was still estranged from Kevin six months later when Vicky gave birth in London to a second son who was promptly named Paul
Cornelius. Sam and Vicky both phoned to invite me to England for the christening, and although I did not want to appear as
if I were seizing the excuse to visit them I promised that Alicia and I would cross the Atlantic in August. I was careful
to stress that we would stay in a hotel. Sam had bought a house overlooking Hyde Park and I had no doubt it was spacious enough
to accommodate us, but I was anxious not to put too great a strain on his hospitality. I didn’t want to upset Vicky by aggravating
the tension which was certain to be present in any reunion between myself and her husband.