The Rich Are Different (14 page)

Six months later we moved uptown to a better neighbourhood and in a flash Dolly was clinging to my arm and smiling up at me adoringly. She
even had the nerve to say she had always known I would make money in the end.

I despised myself for starting to sleep with her again, but she was prettier than ever, I still found it impossible to look at anyone else, and making love with my wife was the only pleasure I could afford. I did not trust her, I did not believe one word of her praise and adulation, I detested every vulgar detail of her shallow slipshod personality, but the physical pleasure she gave me was exquisite. I could no more have given it up than I could have refused my evening meal after a hard day at the office.

By the time Vicky was a year old Dolly found she was pregnant a second time. Again the pregnancy did not agree with her but at least I was now able to engage better medical care and hire a coloured girl to look after Vicky so that Dolly could rest as much as possible. I not only believed all would be well with the confinement; I also had no doubts that the baby would be as healthy as Vicky. Perhaps my father too had thought along similar lines after Charlotte had been born.

The baby arrived with difficulty and lived three days during which his small body was repeatedly racked with suffering. It was impossible not to feel thankful for his sake when he died. Dolly herself died a week later of kidney failure.

Either one of the tragedies would have rendered me distraught. The two together merely made me numb, aware of little except a vague distress. Vicky was taken away to the New England village where my mother had moved earlier to be nearer Charlotte in Boston. Not one member of my family came to the funerals, though my sister sent a note of sympathy. Not one of my former acquaintances among the aristocracy of the Eastern Seaboard acknowledged my loss. But old Mr Reischman gave me paid leave from the office and all my Jewish friends sent flowers, and Young Jacob took me to the cemetery in his own victoria, stood beside me throughout the episcopalian service at the graveside and even bought me dinner at his favourite chophouse before he drove me home.

Eventually I moved further uptown and began to live the luxury of a life without ties. I was just congratulating myself on withstanding my losses with the appropriate courage when the shock slammed into me with all the force of a runaway train hitting the platform buffers, and my distress burgeoned into full-scale grief. I could not eat. I could hardly drag myself to work. I had a childish longing to rush to Boston and seek emotional sustenance from my family, but I found I was incapable of performing the simple steps necessary to make the journey. Besides, when I considered the idea more carefully I found I now resented my family more intensely for refusing to receive Dolly. I certainly wanted a reconciliation, but my pride dictated that the first move must come from them.

Meanwhile I decided that I had to overcome my emotional decline unaided, but as anyone who has ever been bereaved knows, this was easier resolved than achieved. My worst problem was the guilt which kept sweeping over me; I could not rid myself of the notion that I had led Dolly to her
death, and with morbid determination my mind fastened on this hypothesis because I could not endure to think instead of the newborn infant suffering from the disease I myself had transmitted to him.

Finally I found myself unable to bear my misery any longer, and in a paroxysm of grief and guilt I poured out my heart to my current mistress who happened by a great stroke of fortune to be Elizabeth.

I had not known her long enough to realize she was clever as well as beautiful. We had only made love once and it had not been an unqualified success – she was barely twenty-one, very well-bred and painfully virtuous – but there was an element in her personality which attracted me. I felt comfortable with her. At first I thought this was merely because I appreciated a refined woman after my years with Dolly, but later I realized that I felt so pleasantly at ease because Elizabeth reminded me of the women of my own family.

She had been married for two years to a wealthy leisured gentleman much older than she was who obligingly left her alone in New York while he went on hunting expeditions to the Adirondacks. Since she always spoke of him with affection I presumed the marriage was not unsuccessful. They had no children, but that was probably because he had so far been too busy chasing bears to concentrate seriously on perpetuating the family name.

‘… so I killed Dolly,’ I concluded with morbid passion at the end of a muddled monologue.

‘No, Paul,’ said Elizabeth seriously. ‘That is an arbitrary assumption which is not supported by logic. Kidney disease killed Dolly. Perhaps she would have died of it whether or not she had had a child. Almost certainly she would have died of it if she had had the child while married to someone else. I realize that her death makes you feel guilty, but I don’t think you feel guilty because you believe you killed her. I think you feel guilty because you’re secretly glad you’ve been liberated from your marriage – you hate yourself for being glad but you can’t help it. And are you really grieving for Dolly? Are you sure you’re not grieving for yourself? You sacrificed everything for her and yet now it must seem that it was all for nothing. No wonder you’re upset! It must be intolerable for a man of your intelligence to realize you’ve made such foolish mistakes – and all in the name of romance, chivalry and idealism!’

‘What outrageous things to say!’ I cried, vowing never to go to bed with her again, but of course I did for Elizabeth was the only woman who ever really understood me. I always went back to her, even after she bore her husband’s child, even after I married Marietta and even after her husband died and she married Eliot Clayton. Probably I should have married her myself but we were never both single at the same time, divorce was a messy business and I had already had enough mess in my private life to last me a lifetime. Besides I had long since resolved that to marry for love could only prove fatal; I knew all about the fires of passion and how one choked to death afterwards in the ashes.

‘Passion is for liaisons,’ I said firmly to Elizabeth. ‘Marriage should be a business arrangement.’

‘My sentiments
exactly,’ said Elizabeth, and indeed I believe that if I had ever proposed marriage to her she would have turned me down. Both the big-game hunter and her second husband, the Wall Street lawyer, were in their different ways dull steady fellows, and I think in her day-to-day life Elizabeth needed that dependable rock-like predictability which I could never have provided. I was her danger, her intellectual stimulation and her physical adventure; and often it must have seemed to her that a little of me went a very long way.

During the three years which followed Dolly’s death I remained estranged from my family. Some months after the funeral my mother had invited me to Boston for Christmas but had spoilt her attempt at a reconciliation by making a snide remark about my apparent lack of interest in Vicky. I was not indifferent to my daughter but I had been too absorbed in my work and my emotions to think much about her. I knew she was loved and cared for; I knew I did not have to worry about her, and that, as far as my twenty-three-year-old mind was concerned, was sufficient for the moment. Naturally I had resolved to pay more attention to her later when my life was better organized, and meanwhile I bitterly resented my mother’s implied accusation that I was shirking my parental responsibilities. I sent a large wax doll to Boston for Vicky but I myself spent Christmas in New York.

My mother was livid. It took a long time for my sister Charlotte to repair the damage caused by this acrimonious correspondence, but eventually two days before my third Christmas as a widower she managed to drag me to my mother’s doorstep in Massachusetts.

I was sulky but Charlotte, who had made a special journey to New York, was ruthless. ‘It’s an absolute disgrace, Paul, for you to treat your elderly widowed mother like this – no, I don’t care if it
is
all her fault! She’s bringing up your child single-handed and you’re in her debt. Now just you behave yourself and remember your manners! Don’t you think it’s time you said “thank you”, made allowances for Mama’s advancing years and exercised a little Christian charity?’

Evidently it was. I sulked worse than ever but Charlotte escorted me with the vigilance of a jailer and there was no escape. Late on a dark snowy afternoon we reached my mother’s old white house in the little colonial town ten miles from Boston, and even before we had stepped down from the carriage my mother was opening the door. Beyond her the hall was decked with holly, and suddenly as all my childhood memories came out to meet me I was grateful to Charlotte for forcing a truce.

‘Well, Paul,’ said my mother, ‘have we finally buried the hatchet?’

‘What hatchet?’ I said, defiant to the last, and then hugged her so hard that I did not at first realize she was hugging me equally hard in return.

When I had finally kissed her on both cheeks I glanced past her and saw the child.

She was small and dainty, like a child in a painting by Velasquez. She had golden ringlets and huge violet eyes and when she smiled her little face shone with happiness.

‘I always
knew you’d come one day!’ she sang in a clear joyous voice, and running all the way across the hall she flung her little arms around my knees.

[3]

I gave her everything she wanted not only because I had to make amends for years of neglect but because she made sense of my disastrous time with Dolly. When I looked at her I no longer minded my lost years at Oxford, my lost opportunities with Lucius Clyde and my lost faith in the romantic ideals of my youth. I could only think to myself: I was right; it was worth it all. And in believing that, I found Vicky had given me back a part of myself which I thought had been lost beyond recall. Naturally I could not then return, even if I had desired it, to the untarnished years of my adolescence for I was no longer the same man as the youth who had fallen in love with Dolly, but my idealism was born again in Vicky, and in loving her I found an expression for that part of my personality which had no place in the cynic’s world of Wall Street.

I began my campaign to persuade my mother to return with Vicky to New York. The main obstacle was that I did not want to share a household with my mother, yet could not see how I could avoid my obligation to do so. It took six months of extreme diplomacy before I found out my mother’s views on the subject exactly coincided with mine.

‘We would quarrel in no time, Paul,’ she said sensibly. ‘I can’t pretend I approve of you working at Reischman’s; I’m quite sure I would disapprove of most of your friends; and I strongly suspect I would succumb to the temptation to meddle in your private life. I do accept that you’re a grown man and entitled to do as you please, and I firmly believe a mother shouldn’t interfere in those circumstances, but I know it would be easier to practise what I preach if we didn’t live beneath the same roof.’

So when my mother returned to Manhattan to buy a little house on East Twenty-First Street, I continued to live in my luxurious apartment in Murray Hill and we remained good friends. I fear the temptation to criticize me must have severely increased with the years but my mother exercised an iron will and never breathed one adverse word to me on the subject of my private life until I told her I intended to marry Marietta.

Circumstances forced me to marry Marietta. I would have preferred to have remained unmarried, and it was only when my status as a widower became a negotiable asset which it would have been suicidal to ignore that I reluctantly faced the journey to the altar.

The trouble began at Reischman’s. Old Jacob had been in semi-retirement since his eightieth birthday, but it was not until he died five years later that his eldest son Max, a cold, ruthless and brilliant despot, seized the reins of power. Even my friend Young Jacob, who was Max’s eldest son and most loyal admirer, trembled in his shoes. Within days of the funeral the great
overhaul of Reischman’s began, the purge was launched and the heads began to roll.

I knew at once I was doomed. Max Reischman had suffered too many social snubs and business slights from people of my kind to want to keep me, but I knew also that I had a strong bargaining position. I was thirty-two years old, loyal to Reischman’s, trained by Reischman’s and a lucrative source of income to Reischman’s; having been promoted as far as I could go without becoming a partner, I did valuable work for the firm and had even brought them clients who might never otherwise have considered going to a Jewish House. Max Reischman might think me no more than a nuisance but I was determined to show him I could also be a threat to his peace of mind.

I considered my other options but rejected them as unsatisfactory. There was no doubt, for example, that I could now have obtained a job in any Yankee House except Clyde, Da Costa, but thirty-two was an awkward age to change houses, too young to enter a new house as a partner and too old to begin traditionally at the bottom. I would have had to spend years establishing my ability as a banker and my loyalty to my new house, and I might be forty before I achieved the prominence I had at Reischman’s. Besides, I did not know how far my years at Reischman’s would count against me when I was eventually considered for promotion. I knew I had had a superb training in a first-class house, but the Yankee houses would inevitably be suspicious. I could imagine the partners poking around in my pedigree for some hint of a semitic name, and when they failed to find one they would assume my inexplicable choice of house hinted at mental instability. Whichever way they regarded my past career I lost.

I might have sought a position in another Jewish house, but my chances of a partnership would have been non-existent.

I might have founded my own firm if I had had the necessary capital, but I had always spent freely to recompense myself for past poverty, and as usual there was little money in the bank. However, I liked the idea of having my own firm, and after several sleepless nights of Machiavellian plotting I summoned all my courage and asked for an interview with Max Reischman.