The Rich Are Different (15 page)

I suggested to him that if he fired me it was in his own best interests to set me up in my own business since although my clients might not follow me if I founded a new insignificant house, they would undoubtedly follow me from Reischman’s to the House of Morgan, the House of Kidder, Peabody or the House of Lee, Higginson.

‘Thank you, Mr Van Zale,’ said Max Reischman without changing his expression. ‘I have noted your proposal and will give it due consideration.’

I could almost feel the heat of his wrath as I walked to the door.

It took him a week to devise a solution which benefited us both. With a shudder I imagined him pacing his bedroom floor as I had paced mine, and when he sent for me my teeth almost chattered with fright.

‘Sit down, Mr
Van Zale,’ said Max Reischman with his usual impassiveness. ‘I have been making inquiries on your behalf. Are you familiar with a small house called W. D. Chalmers and Company?’

Chalmers was a conservative little house which had run into prosperity three decades ago and had been declining ever since. The sole surviving partner, William Chalmers, was seventy, a Southerner, but not quite a Southern Gentleman; it was rumoured that he had made his fortune by profiteering in the Civil War, and had never since ventured south of the Mason–Dixon Line for fear of assassination. He had a careful Yankee accent, parsimonious habits and a large house in Brooklyn.

‘I’ve never met Chalmers,’ I said, ‘but I’ve heard of him.’

‘He’s an expert on the cotton industry. I threw a little business his way the other day when someone from the garment district came to us about expansion. It was a small matter, too trivial for Reischman’s, but these days Chalmers appreciates whatever he can get. He did a similar favour for my father once when the positions of our firms were reversed.’ He looked out of the window as he allowed me time to digest this information. ‘Chalmers will take you as a full partner,’ he continued presently. ‘He admits he hates the thought of selling his business or merging with another firm yet he has no sons to succeed him. The firm’s ailing but it’s basically sound. The old man’s ailing too but he can give you what you want.’

‘I can’t bring any money into the firm.’

‘He says he’ll overlook that. I told him you were a brilliant young man who could bring his House back to the prestige it enjoyed thirty years ago, and he believed me.’

‘Thank you, Mr Reischman.’

‘My pleasure, Mr Van Zale.’

He smiled. I smiled. We sat there disliking each other and then he said smoothly: ‘He’s attracted to your name too, of course. For a “
novus homo
” like Chalmers a patrician name such as Van Zale has a certain irresistible charm.’

There was another pause. I waited. At last with perfect timing Max Reischman added casually: ‘I believe he has a daughter,’ and all the cynicism of a sophisticated New Yorker was reflected for a second in his chilly blue eyes.

I did wonder if Miss Chalmers was either deformed or a mental defective, and was therefore most relieved to discover she was a vivacious young woman with a figure which would have put any hour-glass to shame. I did wonder too why old Chalmers was so frantic to see her settled, but it was only after I was married that I realized he had probably been terrified she would destroy her reputation before she made a good match. Marietta might not have been a deformed imbecile but she was certainly a promiscuous fool.

However, it took a couple of years for Marietta to become tiresome and meanwhile it seemed matters had worked out well. Max Reischman had got rid of me without having to set me up in my own firm, and I now controlled
a private banking business which, though not yet my own, would certainly be mine in the course of time. I already had a roster of clients. All I had to do was to transform the firm into the most successful second-rank house in town.

To be a second-rank house in New York was not necessarily to be second-rate, for plenty of second-rank houses had stalwart prosperous reputations. The difference between them and the front-rank houses which ruled investment banking lay most noticeably in their clients. Morgan’s clients were the leading corporations of America and foreign governments, while Chalmers’ clients were more likely to run mail-order businesses or a group of garment factories. However, a second-rank house could be influential, and often the big houses such as Morgan’s would use a solid second-rank house as a partner in a deal too inconvenient for them to handle alone. If I could only build up my house’s wilted reputation I knew it would be only a matter of time before I could at last cross swords with the House of Clyde, Da Costa at One Willow Street on the corner of Wall.

I worked hard and lived dangerously. I took on any business that came my way and hustled for new ventures with the verve of a flim-flam man. I gambled on clients that other houses had turned down, I swung deals no one else would touch and I dived deep into debt as I lived like a millionaire to woo and impress the biggest clients in town. I had a large house off Madison, a brougham, a barouche and an imported 1904 Daimler Landaulette; I had innumerable servants, a gorgeous bejewelled wife, a yacht, a private railroad car and a cottage at Newport; I belonged to fourteen different clubs, gave enormous balls and lavish dinner-parties, and made sure my name was constantly before my potential clients in the society columns of the New York newspapers. I dazzled New York, I horrified every banking house by my skill in evading the law that a private banker must not advertise, and I infuriated the snobs who wanted to call me shoddy but could not because of my ancient pedigree.

I also made a great deal of money.

By the time I was forty I was no longer a confidence man fooling New York by pretending I was already successful. I was a millionaire several times over, my creditors had all been paid and I had the sharpest, flashiest, richest second-rank house in New York. The firm was now called P. C. Van Zale and Company, my father-in-law was long since dead and Marietta was my ex-wife. My enemies had given up predicting I was riding for a fall and my friends were hailing me as a genius, but no one dreamt that my greatest ambition was still unfulfilled – in fact I doubt if anyone thought I now had any ambition other than dressing like a dandy, living like a lord and sleeping with every society woman in town.

However there was no denying my success and everyone, even Jason Da Costa, now sought my company.

‘Hullo, Paul! We always seem to be bumping into each other these days, don’t we? How are you?’

I can
see him now as he was then, three years past forty but still in his prime. His thick glossy hair still waved in exactly the right places, his florid, arrogant, handsome face was still just as distinguished, and his brown eyes were just as cool, hooded and haughty. He had a trick of letting his eyelids droop lazily as he looked down his long Roman nose. Women found this mannerism irresistible, his opponents found it intimidating and I found it thoroughly ridiculous.

‘Paul, there’s something I’ve been wanting to say to you for a long time. I want to apologize for all that verbal hazing I gave you in the past. I’m afraid I was a spoilt insensitive young man and I’d like to think I now have more compassion and humanity … I’ve always been true to that promise I made to your father, you know. I swore it on my honour as a gentleman and I hope I’m gentleman enough to know that one should always be loyal to one’s class.’

Normally I would have found this pompous expression of the philosophy of the Eastern Seaboard oligarchy at least worth a smile, but on this occasion all attempt at humour was impossible. After a pause I said: ‘I’m well now. I’m cured.’

‘Well, of course I realized …’ He droned on for a minute or two about how he had never doubted it. Finally he said: ‘No hard feelings, Paul?’

‘No hard feelings, Jay.’

‘Fine. I’m glad … Stay in touch, won’t you, Paul,’ he said with his spurious charm and glided away from me among the other bankers at the reception like a big shark cruising among a host of smaller fry.

A month later after we had both participated in a Morgan syndicate I offered him a place on a list of preferential clients who were certain to make a hundred per cent profit if they bought securities in a railroad I was reorganizing. Two months later he returned the favour. Within six months he was inviting me to his House to discuss sharing the load of launching a new copper mine in Utah.

‘How kind of you,’ I said. ‘Is my uncle involved in this?’

‘Well, Mr Clyde is semi-retired now, but yes, he’s interested in this deal.’

‘Then I insist that you both walk down Willow Street to my office and allow me to be the host at the meeting. I called on Mr Clyde once and he never returned the courtesy. I think he’ll agree it’s owing to me.’

There was a pause while Jay summed up the situation and decided he had nothing to lose except a useful ally for the copper flotation.

‘I’ll talk to Mr Clyde,’ he said.

My uncle Lucius protested he had arthritis. I said the deal was off. Jay, much annoyed by my uncle’s stubbornness, carted him into my office in a wheelchair.

‘Uncle Lucius!’ I exclaimed. ‘How nice!’ And I clasped his hand with a warmth which chilled him.

‘Suppose I ought to congratulate you, Paul,’ he muttered into his moustaches.

‘Why no, Uncle Lucius!’ I said with my fondest smile. ‘You have only
yourself to congratulate. It was you who gave me my ambition to be a banker.’

Uncle Lucius went purple but said nothing. Jay looked wary. I watched them serenely as sherry and pound-cake were served, and reflected how fortuitous it was that my uncle was now a mere sleeping partner while Jay held the reins of power in the firm.

We began to discuss business. After ten minutes Uncle Lucius had recovered from his sulks, and after half an hour he was garrulous. Finally I held up my hand, silenced him and said casually to Jay: ‘Have that nurse wheel him out, would you? Senile behaviour is really so damnably tedious and I think you’ll agree that his presence here is quite immaterial to our discussions.’

Jay never hesitated. Lucius Clyde was past history and I offered a lucrative future. Like all gifted bankers Jay knew when to cut his losses.

‘I realize Paul’s being unforgivably rude, Mr Clyde,’ I heard him murmur to a sheet-white Uncle Lucius, ‘but I see little point in arguing with him. For the good of the firm …’

After the male nurse had removed the wheelchair Jay and I looked at one another in silence. I knew then that he had my measure, just as I had his, and in the dark sinister depths of the ocean which was Wall Street, shark saluted shark in the teeming bloodied waters.

The bizarrest part of all was that we were the perfect match. Once I had thought that success had come early to Jay simply because he had had all the luck and the right connections, but now I saw for myself what I had long since come to suspect: that he was a man whose ability matched my own. Yet our talents differed greatly. Jay had the true financial brain, a skill in dealing with figures and a gift for developing complex mental abstractions which were awesome in their originality. My talent was for gambling and I gambled with people. I was perfectly capable of working out a merger involving several million dollars, several types of securities, a selling syndicate of a hundred and fifty people, and the profit for all parties down to the last cent, but my success as a banker was primarily because I always knew which corporations should merge and which should not, which people should form the syndicate and which should be omitted, who should deal and who should stay on the sidelines. I knew how to get the most out of my staff too; I set the pace by working harder than anyone and I was always unstintingly generous to those who tried to work harder than I did. Jay, who also worked hard, kept himself aloof from his staff and as a result had less influence with them. Part of the trouble was that he had never had to work his way up through the ranks, but he was incurably snobbish and even looked down on Harvard men because they had not been to his beloved Yale. However, with his financial brain and my gambling streak we formed a formidable team.

I have no idea when he first suspected I wanted his palace at One Willow Street. Maybe he always knew but, thinking himself impregnable, enjoyed playing me along, using my talent for his own profit and my obsession for
his own amusement. Or maybe he did not at first see the drift of my ambition but knew instinctively that although I made a splendid collaborator I would make a lethal bed-fellow. His House was large but if he ever let my firm merge with his he might awake one morning to find that his House had become too small to hold the two of us in comfort. It was so much wiser to keep me in my House at the other end of Willow Street, so much safer to hold me at arm’s length no matter how often our names were joined together in business. Jay was no fool. He had my measure and he knew what was good for him.

I was no fool either. Jay had something I wanted, but without a mutual exchange of assets I was stuck, and I was just thinking in despair that I would never achieve my ambition of sitting in Lucius Clyde’s chair when the deck of cards in my gambler’s hands was reshuffled and I saw I had a winning hand.

Vicky came back from Europe.

[4]

‘Good God!’ said Jason Da Costa. ‘This can’t be little Vicky!’

‘Oh Papa, Mr Da Costa’s so
handsome
…’

They had not seen each other for several years for Vicky had been living with my mother whose social circle was far removed from my own. Also Jay had been overseas on business when Vicky had made her debut, and since his two sons were younger than she was he did not meet her through them. In the old days he would have seen her each summer at Newport, but since my divorce from Marietta I now retired to Bar Harbor each summer with my mother and daughter. In retrospect it seems odd that Jay had not seen Vicky since she was a child, but at the time it seemed unremarkable. I had not seen his boys for years either, and in fact failed to recognize them when they arrived at the huge ball I gave for Vicky to welcome her back to New York.

It was the late fall of 1912. I was forty-two and had been married to Sylvia for four months. Jay was forty-five and between marriages. Someone had told me that he had developed a fatal weakness for young girls but I had forgotten; it had hardly seemed important at the time.