Sins of the Fathers (47 page)

I just managed to get my temper under control. Speaking in a voice which rang with a calm measured logic I said evenly: ‘I
wanted Vicky to be happy. I thought she would be happy as a wife and mother. Therefore if I thought finding such happiness
constituted success, will you please tell me why I shouldn’t have wanted that kind of success for my daughter?’

‘Why? I’ll tell you why! It’s because you didn’t want that kind of success for
her
sake – you wanted it for yours! You wanted and still do want – a so-called successful daughter so that all the world can
say in admiration: gee, what a successful father he is to have such a successful daughter! Sam isn’t the only guy around here
who’s not as confident
as he seems to be, Cornelius, and he’s not the only guy I’ve ever met who uses women to boost his ego!’

‘Jesus Christ!’ I shouted, but again I somehow got my temper under control. ‘Look, I’ve had just about enough of this pseudo-egghead
crap you keep dishing out to me – where did you get it all from? Those popular psychology books you picked up from the racks
in the five-and-dime? Let’s get back to the facts. I’m only interested in the facts. Fact number one: Vicky genuinely wanted
to be a wife and mother. Fact number two: all women basically want to be wives and mothers—’

‘No, honey, they don’t. Sorry, but they just don’t. My fifty per cent of the human race isn’t a bunch of identical plastic
dolls. We’re human beings and we’re all different and – incredible though this may seem to you – we don’t all want the same
thing. In fact the real rockbottom truth is that we’re as diverse as that other half of the human race, the half you take
such arrogant pride in belonging to!’

I had a better grip on myself now but I was still taut with rage. ‘I’m not denying the diversity of the human race! I’m talking
about the basic instincts of mating and reproduction which are common to everyone! Of course there are different types of
women – God knows, no one could be less like you than Vicky—’

‘How can you possibly make such a statement? You don’t know the first thing about me! You probably don’t know the first thing
about that daughter of yours either! You’re all cut off and sewn up!’

‘My God, how could I sleep with you for nine years and not know you? You’re—’

‘I’m Teresa Kowalewski and I need a canvas and room to paint and no money worries and – oh yes, a good fuck on a regular basis,
I guess I’d miss that if I didn’t have it although it often seems more trouble than it’s worth. However, knowing your talent
for seeing women in only one light you probably think we’re just like a married couple – oh, I’m a little eccentric, sure,
but basically I only live for your visits when I can play house, cook you a nice meal and pretend I’m just another happy middle-class
housewife. Well, I’ve got news for you, honey. I’ve got a whole big meaningful life which exists quite independently of you,
and although I’m content for you to stop by now and then, all you really are to me is a cheque-book and a hard-on. That’s
the real world, Cornelius. That’s the way things really are. Am I getting through to you at all or am I still talking Chinese?’

The doorbell rang.

We went on staring at each other. The doorbell rang again.

‘Shit,’ said Teresa. ‘I guess I’d better see who that is.’

She moved into the hall.

I went on sitting on the couch and looking at my untasted glass of scotch, but dimly I became aware of voices.

‘I’m sorry. I’ve got to see him.’

‘Hey, wait a minute! What the hell—’

‘Excuse me, please.’

My two separate worlds were grinding crazily against each other. The Park had ceased to exist. Fifth Avenue was streaming
alongside Central Park West in a great roaring freeway and I was trapped on a concrete strip in the middle.

I was on my feet as Alicia appeared in the doorway and as I stared, not understanding, Teresa pushed past her into the room.

‘What the hell’s going on? Look, if you two are going to have some big bust-up would you mind not doing it in my apartment?’

Alicia’s eyes met mine. My heart began to beat quietly, like the sea thudding far away in the distance.

‘Cornelius, if Alicia’s going to make some shitty scene, could you for God’s sake get her out of here right away?’

Alicia’s face was still but shadowed with grief. My heart began to thump a little louder, surf pounding more insistently on
some deserted shore.

‘Jesus Christ, what is it? Why the hell doesn’t someone say something? What
is
it, for God’s sake?’

We were still halfway across Bede’s lighted hall but someone had slipped out ahead of time into the dark.

‘It’s Sam, Cornelius,’ said Alicia.

The sea rushed towards me and all was lost in the roar of the undertow.

‘What about Sam?’ said Teresa suspiciously. ‘What’s he done?’

I did not answer for I was way back in another era, and as the years cartwheeled away before my eyes I saw the tall homely
boy hold out his hand at Bar Harbor and exclaim: ‘Hi – good to meet you!’ The kaleidoscope of time revolved. I was at Willow
and Wall after Paul’s murderers had shot themselves to death and Sam was shaking with me as we helped Steve Sullivan to his
feet. I was on Fifth Avenue in the great golden summer of 1929 when it seemed the good times would never end. I was dancing
with long-forgotten girls, I was drunk on bathtub gin, I was having the time of my life with the best friend I would ever
have, and far away in the distance I could hear Miff Mole and his Molers playing ‘Alexander’s Ragtime Band.’

‘He had a heart attack when he was halfway home,’ said Alicia. ‘The chauffeur drove at once to the nearest hospital but it
was too late. He died almost at once.’

I thought again of Scott saying: ‘Has it all been worth it?’ and now when I looked back at my struggles with Sam I saw at
once that they were meaningless. Everything was meaningless, all our schemes for revenge and counter-revenge, all our empty
preoccupations with power – even power itself was ultimately meaningless because when you reached the end of that lighted
hall there was no power on earth which could save you from the dark.

My whole world tilted on its axis and then shattered as if it had been blown to bits in some huge crucible. If all power was
ultimately meaningless, then it no longer mattered whether or not I had the power to father children. In the end it made no
difference whether I had one daughter or ten sons. In the end, sterile or fertile, we all had to die.

The one unalterable fact of life was death, and as I allowed myself to look my death squarely in the face for the first time
I realized I would have to find some way of living with that death’s unendurable relevance. I had to find an antidote to negate
the horror of non-being, and the opposite of non-being was surely to
be
– I had to be, I had to live, but not in the old sterile way of communicating with people through power. Power had only cut
me off from people but now I had to reach them, I had to break out of that steel-lined room my power had welded around me,
I had to communicate with others if I were to avoid isolation’s living death.

I looked at Alicia and saw her actor’s mask had been broken. I saw past her immaculate self-control then, past all her defences,
past all the grief and suffering which had separated us for so long. I looked at her and saw that she grieved for me, that
the pity which I had always resented so fiercely wasn’t pity at all but something far finer, a compassion incapable of contempt
and an unselfishness rendering no sacrifice too great to endure. I looked at her and saw the past transformed.

Jake no longer mattered, just as Teresa no longer mattered. I did not need to be told now why she had rejected him as soon
as I had discovered the affair; I knew it was because she loved me too much to force me into the role of complaisant husband
and too much to hurt me again by turning to someone else. She had always loved me, just as I had always loved her, and by
some miracle almost too great to grasp I looked at her and saw she loved me still.

Teresa was whispering in a hushed voice: ‘But that’s terrible
news … terrible … he was so young – was he even fifty? Why I can’t believe it … Sam …’

I heard her but I never saw her. My eyes saw only Alicia. I began to walk across the soft carpet.

Teresa was saying: ‘Honey, I’m so sorry – it must be terrible for you. But you hadn’t been close to Sam for years, had you?
You weren’t truly friends any more.’

Alicia said clearly in her crispest voice: ‘Miss Kowalewski, can’t you see what this means to Cornelius? It’s as if he’s lost
a limb. Can’t you see how completely alone he is?’

But I wasn’t alone after all. I went on walking, one step in front of the other, past the ugly orange couch, past the ugly
orange chair, and as I walked I thought: I’ve got to get there. I’ve got to make it.

Yet in the end I didn’t have to go all the way. Alicia came to meet me. She stepped forward, holding out her arms, and the
next moment when I reached her our long nightmare came at last to an end.

Her tears were wet against my cheeks. Closing my eyes I held her in the dark, and all I said as the great wasteland of our
troubles disintegrated was: ‘Take me home.’

12 February, 1958. Sam Keller dies but I’m reborn because I now have a second chance to get what I want and this time I’m
going to succeed.

I see Cornelius who looks like a tubercular wraith. I don’t know what to say. In the end I mutter: ‘Sorry.’ He looks at me
as if I’m some kind of ape but he’s in such a state of shock that he takes my condolences at their face value.

He’ll never know how much I always disliked Sam.

17 February. Sam Keller’s funeral. Bright colours glowing against the wintry background of the godawful Westchester cemetery.
Cornelius has made room in the Van Zale family plot for his brother by unofficial adoption. Sam’s mother died last year and
he had no other blood relatives.

The sun shines. Crowds of mourners cram round the grave. Sam alienated a lot of people at Willow and Wall during the last
year of his life when he was crashing around trying to be a bigger sonofabitch than Cornelius, but that’s all forgotten now
and people can only remember how popular he once was; everyone talks of that famous Keller charm.

The riot of flowers glows obscenely against the frozen background. The repulsive ceremony progresses inch by inch. Horrible.
Why can’t we dispose of our dead better? In Ancient Rome they had the right idea: a big funeral pyre and a lavish dignified
oration. Even the Celts were more natural with their keenings and their wakes. Some of the Germanic tribes once cremated their
dead in style, but once those Angles and those Saxons got together for keeps they developed this nauseous tradition of stealthily
scraping little holes in the earth for their dead and then stealthily scraping the earth back again over the corpses, like
cats burying a mess. Disgusting. I wonder what the Reischmans think of all these closed Anglo-Saxon faces striving to maintain
an impassive silence. I haven’t been to a Jewish funeral yet. A treat in store. Oh God.

I see Mother with her face like a marble effigy. Why doesn’t she cry? Why does no one cry? It’s so unnatural. We should be
yelling and screaming and tearing our hair in a rage against the horror of death. Now
that
would be an interesting scene. Dali would paint it well: a lot of tortured faces with funeral wreaths spewing out of their
mouths, all
set against a desert to express the sterility of repressed emotion. Or maybe Bosch would have painted it better: a canvas
dotted with little creatures suffering and dark horrors lurking in the background.

I see Andrew in uniform and Lori, looking glamorous, beside him. The eldest child is only three so they’ve left the kids behind
in Manhattan, but I think children should come to funerals no matter how old they are; they could teach the adults how to
behave more naturally. I must talk to Andrew but it’s difficult. What goes on in Andrew’s head? Can he conceivably be quite
so happy as he appears to be? Probably, yes. He may be bright enough to learn how to drive a plane without crashing it, but
even the dumbest animals can be taught clever tricks and there’s something very dumb about Andrew. Dumb people are the lucky
ones, of course. They haven’t the brains to grasp how godawful life really is. I like Lori, though. Wonder what she’s like
in bed. Oh well.

I see Aunt Emily, looking like a virgin, and Rose, who undoubtedly is and always will be a virgin, standing beside her. Rose
is like Aunt Emily, sexless, not dumb but like someone with restricted vision, a first-class horse in blinkers. I guess I
like Aunt Emily, and Rose too, but I can’t connect with them. Nothing to say.

I see the Van Zale partners, the stuffed shirts, all dumber than me except Scott. I like Scott. I especially notice Scott
with his black hair and black eyes and white taut face. Wyclif probably looked like Scott – all the medieval heretics probably
looked like Scott as they went to the stake prepared to die for something that exists purely on a cerebral level. There’s
something very strange about Scott. Spooky. But he plays a good game of squash and he’s smart on the job. The other day he
figured out that Coastal Aluminum issue like a master-chef boning a sole.

I see the Bar Harbor Brotherhood, grey middle-aged men in black, their faces beaten with grief. Cornelius and Jake stand some
way apart but Kevin is right beside Cornelius, and when they met before the service they shook hands and talked for a while.
I like Kevin Daly but I don’t know him well. Probably I never shall. How I wish I were like Kevin Daly, so sparkling always,
never at a loss for something to say, always so full of charm – but not charm like Sam Keller’s celebrated mannerisms which
to me always reeked of artificiality. Sam’s charm was like water spewing out of a faucet but Kevin’s charm is like water bubbling
up from a spring. Yes, I admire Kevin Daly and I like his plays. He’s better than Williams, although I like Williams’ plays’
southern sex and neurotic tension. Kevin writes about sex and neurosis too, though he’s not so interested in sexual mechanics.
He’s more interested
in sex as a form of communication which can range so astoundingly from blissful perfection to hellish failure. Sometimes I
think Kevin’s as good as Miller, although I don’t believe there’s an American playwright alive who could surpass
Death of a Salesman
.

Yes, Kevin’s a gifted guy … Wonder what it’s like to do it with boys. Maybe I should have tried that but no, I’d miss all
the things that women have. Funny about Kevin’s sexual tastes. He looks so obviously like that segment of the American male
population which Kinsey was generous enough – or dumb enough – to describe as normal.

Kevin’s the only one of the Bar Harbor Brotherhood that I can look at without wanting to smash something. Jake looks sick,
the old hypocrite, although he hated Sam for being one of the Master Race. But it must be a bad jolt when one of your contemporaries
drops dead, even if the contemporary happens to be an ex-Nazi who always made you want to throw up. God, how the Jews suffered
in the war.

I see Cornelius looking like a corpse. One day he
will
be a corpse, and then where will I be? In clover, with any luck – the clover-field of the senior partner’s office at Willow
and Wall. I don’t like Cornelius and he doesn’t like me, but I respect him. I think he respects me a little too. He’s going
to respect me more. I think Cornelius knows that he’s going to respect me more. There’s one thing I have to admit about Cornelius:
although he’s extraordinarily dumb in many ways, he’s no fool as soon as he crosses that threshold at Willow and Wall. In
fact as far as survival on Wall Street’s concerned, he’s the smartest guy I know. It takes a certain effort to admire a man
who seldom opens a book and who thinks of art primarily in terms of financial investment, but it’s worth making the effort
because it doesn’t pay to underestimate Cornelius. We all know that at Willow and Wall because the unemployment rate among
those who forget is always one hundred per cent.

I see more bankers; I see brokers, lawyers and politicians; I see endless rows of blank faces. Everyone’s come to the sordid
cemetery to breathe the air polluted by those nauseous flowers – everyone except the most important person of all, the girl
who’s going to belong to me some day, the heroine I’m going to save. Vicky’s in hospital suffering from nervous exhaustion.
Three doctors swore she was incapable of attending her husband’s funeral.

I love Vicky. There’s a line by John Donne: ‘For God’s sake hold your tongue, and let me love.’ If Vicky would only stop talking
and listen to my silences she would learn so much. I have no words for all I want to say, but if I were given the chance I
could so easily prove how much I love her. What a stupid system language is. How strange that
we should all communicate by opening our mouths and flapping our tongues and uttering little sounds. There should be a more
concise way of communicating; we should have lights on our foreheads or hands with fifty fingers all tapping out some faultlessly
unambiguous code. If there is a God, which I doubt, he fell down very badly on the communication front.

‘Oh Sebastian!’ sighs my wife Elsa as we walk away. ‘Wasn’t it a lovely funeral?’

I like Elsa. She’s stupid but I like her anyway. At first I thought she was clever because her designs are so good, but the
designs are a freak. I read once about a mental defective who couldn’t write his name but could calculate logarithms in his
head. That’s like Elsa. She does these highly original designs of human eyes on richly patterned backgrounds, but there’s
nothing else there. I used to take her to New Jersey because I found it such an amusingly eerie reflection of our abominable
culture, but although Elsa laughed with me she secretly liked it. I discovered that when I asked her where she wanted to go
for our honeymoon. ‘Las Vegas,’ she said, and she was serious. I offered her the whole of South America – I’d temporarily
had Europe up to the eyeballs after my mandatory period of slavery as an army officer in Germany – I offered her Rio de Janeiro,
all the Inca relics of Peru, even the chic coastal resorts of Chile, but she said no, Las Vegas, and please could we stay
in a motel. Well, we did and I have to concede it sure made New Jersey look tame. God, what a culture we have. It’ll all get
wiped out one day, of course. I give it fifty years. Of all the great empires the world has known, ours will be the shortest.
Two hundred years of chasing the Godalmighty Dollar, and what do we produce? The A-Bomb and
I Love Lucy
.

But I didn’t mind Las Vegas because Elsa was so cute, dumb but cute, and I liked looking after her. I’d never had anyone to
take care of before because Cornelius always takes care of the people in our family. I liked having sex any time I wanted
it too. Elsa never said no and I was so pleased that she never seemed to mind that we saw little in Las Vegas except our motel
bedroom. But after all, that’s what honeymoons are for.

When we got settled in our new East Side apartment I suggested we might as well have a baby and she said okay so we did. No
problems. I liked her being pregnant and I was pleased when the baby was a boy. I would have been pleased with a girl too
but I always think it’s best to have the boy first so that he can take care of his sisters later. However it turned out this
boy was destined to have no sisters because not long
after the birth something went wrong with Elsa’s ovaries and the doctor said sorry, no more children. That was a pity. I liked
this baby. It was red with black hair and it kept its eyes closed most of the time. It interested me. Probably I loved it,
although the emotion I felt didn’t feel like love in the usual sense. However, if anyone had tried to take the baby away I
would have gone after the thief without thinking twice, clubbed him to pieces and grabbed the baby back. Elsa moaned about
how painful breast-feeding was and how her haemorrhoids were killing her, but the little baby lay snug in his crib saying
nothing stupid, a minute individual with a mind of his own. Smart clever baby. Dumb stupid Elsa. Poor Elsa. I was fond of
her in many ways.

Half the trouble with Elsa was that her culture remained foreign to me. I tried hard to study it but I found nothing to tie
me emotionally to those oriental aspects, and all the time I was conscious that I would always remain an outsider, the gentile
who had had the outrageous nerve to marry into the great House of Reischman. I was conscious too how different the Jews were,
not inferior, not superior, but just different, different, different. They looked at the world from a different angle, saw
history from a different point of view and had different defence mechanisms for dealing with their vast collective consciousness
of suffering and pain.

Of course it’s misleading nowadays to make any generalizations about racial, cultural and religious groups. In the old days
when the groups were clearly defined there was some excuse for it; Celts were redheads who wore moustaches, Anglo-Saxons were
huge blonds and so on, and such was the homogeneity which existed within each group that it was possible for an outsider to
make certain intelligent generalizations which had a hope of being accurate. (Even so one wonders about some of the more prejudiced
remarks of historians like Caesar and Tacitus.) But nowadays we’re all so intermarried that any generalization must surely
be garbage, and any form of prejudice must be untenable from an anthropological as well as a moral point of view. However
that didn’t stop the Reischmans from treating me as if I were a member of an inferior species, and that didn’t stop me from
beginning to wonder in despair if they were right.

My mother-in-law was no problem (I think she found me sexually attractive) but my father-in-law was a disaster. At first I
thought he would make some effort to be pleasant to me since Cornelius was one of his oldest friends, but evidently he had
taken offence somewhere along the line around the time Elsa and I became engaged, and he behaved like a man who couldn’t bear
to set eyes on me because I reminded him of some deep personal hurt. Mother’s
rampant anti-Semitism had probably got to him in the end, and remembering some of the remarks she had handed out to me at
my engagement I wasn’t one bit surprised.

With few exceptions the rest of the Reischmans were equally tough. Elsa had a younger brother, a good kid who found the home
scene just as stultifying as I did, but the married sister in New Jersey was as dreary as her mother, and the Reischman relations
were appalling. I’m not being anti-Semitic. Some of my Foxworth relations are appalling too but at least I feel I can handle
them because I know I’m just as good as they are.

I decided I had to learn to handle the Reischmans, and automatically I turned to my culture to sustain me. If the Jews could
glorify the Passover and the Irish could swoon over Brian Boru in order to sustain them in hostile environments, surely I
could discover some appropriate Anglo-Saxon skeleton in the closet! It was only then I realized I knew next to nothing about
my remote ancestors. Having walloped western civilization and come out on top the Anglo-Saxons have no need to be interested
in their early origins; why waste time picking over tribal myths when you can spend that time enjoying your position as top
of the heap? Besides, the exquisitely civilized present, crammed as it is with privilege, snobbery and power, is so much more
entertaining than the violent, savage, distinctly murky past. Ah yes, I knew exactly what it was like to be a member of a
privileged minority! But what the Reischmans succeeded in teaching me against all the odds was what hell it is to be a member
of a persecuted race, and within six months of my marriage they had reduced me to a constantly simmering state of humiliation,
mortification and rage.