The Rich Are Different (25 page)

It was in early April that Paul suddenly decided to see Cornelius. The decision to force Mildred’s hand came quite out of the blue and as far as I could see for no reason. One day he was saying with his usual lack of enthusiasm: ‘I must do something about Mildred’s boy,’ and the next he was saying: ‘I’m going to have a showdown with Mildred about this!’ and was reaching for the telephone.

But Mildred had her excuses ready. Cornelius’ health had improved; he was about to attend school for the first time and would be fully occupied
until the end of the semester. Then after the Fourth of July the entire family was heading for Canada for Wade’s first long vacation in years.

‘When are you due back from Canada?’ said Paul. ‘The end of August? Very well, you can send Cornelius to New York directly afterwards and he can spend a week with us before his school starts again.’

They argued but Paul won. Perhaps Mildred had always known she was fighting a losing battle. For a moment I wondered what Cornelius thought of the situation, but I suspected that no one would have asked his opinion. Perhaps he did not want to come. Indeed by this time I myself was wondering if Paul’s pulverizing orbit was the best place for a delicate sheltered boy, and when I remembered Bruce Clayton I could only hope that Cornelius would be more fortunate in his career as a Van Zale protégé. It even occurred to me that he might be better off altogether if he failed to qualify as a protégé and was allowed to withdraw quietly to Ohio.

The entire situation troubled me increasingly as the summer passed, and the suddenness of Paul’s interest in Cornelius troubled me most of all because I felt sure there was a reason for it, yet I could not guess what that reason was. ‘I don’t want a son,’ Paul had said to me over and over again, but he behaved all that summer as if it were of vital importance to him to discover the perfect substitute for the son he had never had, and as the time of Cornelius’ visit drew closer I no longer knew whether I wanted Cornelius to succeed or fail. I only wanted neither of them to be hurt.

It seemed like an impossible dream.

[1]

The train from Cincinnati was on time, and as the doors opened I strained my eyes for a glimpse of Cornelius. Passengers streamed past. I was just thinking he must have missed the train when I saw him walking towards me.

Although I had not seen him for some years I had no trouble recognizing him for his hair was still golden and his features had not greatly changed. He was small for his age but neat and compact. As I watched, someone bumped into him but his expression never altered. He merely adjusted the coat on his arm and walked on down the platform.

‘Cornelius!’ I raised my hand to attract his attention and when he saw me he smiled. It was a shy smile, very trusting. He looked angelic. If hearts could melt mine would have dissolved instantly.

‘Hullo, Aunt Sylvia.’ His voice had finished breaking and the educated accent of the mid-west was pleasant to the ear. ‘Thanks for coming to meet me.’

I asked
him about the journey and inquired after his family while Abrahams the junior chauffeur claimed the baggage and took it outside to the Cadillac.

‘Paul was so sorry he couldn’t meet you,’ I said to Cornelius as we left the terminal and began our journey home, ‘but he had some important conferences downtown. However he should be home by six – he said he’d make a special effort to get home early.’

‘Yes.’ He was staring out of the window at New York City, and the light, slanting on the classically moulded bones of his face, gave his black-lashed grey eyes a starry look. I suddenly realized with surprise that he had inherited the fine straight Van Zale mouth which looked so odd on the women of the family and so very attractive on the men. For a moment I envied Mildred her beautiful son, and then in a painful effort to divert myself I pondered on the appropriateness of the word ‘beautiful’. That was surely the wrong word to use since in an adolescent boy it implied effeminacy, yet it was impossible for me to connect effeminacy with that familiar Van Zale mouth. I toyed with other adjectives. ‘Good-looking’ implied someone rugged like Steve Sullivan, and Cornelius with his slight build hardly reminded me of Steve. Perhaps ‘handsome’ was a better word, though to me that implied a maturity which a fifteen-year-old boy hardly possessed. The dubious word ‘beautiful’ returned reluctantly to my mind, and as I gazed at Cornelius’ curling golden hair, his fair unblemished skin and his exquisitely chiselled features I could understand why Mildred was so anxious to protect him from the corruption which Paul’s New York world represented to her.

When we arrived home I showed him to his room and left him to settle down. I had expected him to be shy with me and so I was surprised at lunch when he talked easily about his home and school. It occurred to me that his mother’s absence made it easier for him to behave with confidence. Mildred could be very overpowering.

After lunch he said he wanted to go out for a walk and I tactfully left him to amuse himself for the remainder of the afternoon.

Shortly before Paul was due home I found Cornelius loitering by the library and suggested we went up to the drawing-room. ‘Would you like anything to drink?’ I added. ‘Paul always has tomato juice and I always have sherry but do have whatever you like.’

‘Tomato juice would be just fine. How do you manage to have sherry, Aunt Sylvia?’ he said with puzzled innocence, and wondering in alarm if he would report my answer to Mildred, an enthusiastic supporter of the Eighteenth Amendment, I avoided all mention of the lax New York attitude to Prohibition and said Paul obtained the sherry through influential foreign clients.

Mason had just brought our drinks when far away I heard the sound of voices and knew Paul had returned.

Opposite me on the couch Cornelius sat bolt upright and assumed a studiedly neutral expression.

‘Paul’s so looking forward to seeing you!’ I said encouragingly, aware that
I was just as nervous as he was, but I believe he barely heard me. His eyes, dark with concentration, were focused on the door which Paul flung open a second later.

‘Well!’ Paul paused on the threshold. Both Cornelius and I rose to our feet as obediently as puppets in the hands of their manipulator, and for a moment the scene was a tableau taut with indefinable undercurrents of emotion. Then Paul smiled, said to me: ‘Good evening, my dear!’ and gave me a kiss before turning to his great-nephew.

‘Hullo,’ he said easily. ‘You’ve grown. How are you?’

Cornelius tried to speak but could not. As I watched in an agony of embarrassment he began to blush.

‘What’s the matter?’ said Paul with a brutality which made me want to retreat to some quiet corner and shrivel up in despair. ‘Did your mother never give you the chance to learn to talk?’

‘Yes, sir,’ said Cornelius, absolutely wooden.

They shook hands, and the family resemblance, slender and elusive, danced fleetingly before my eyes. To my relief the butler chose that moment to arrive with Paul’s tomato juice.

‘Thank you, Mason,’ said Paul. ‘Sit down, Cornelius. Now—’

The most dreadful ten minutes followed. Under ruthless cross-examination Cornelius revealed that he had hated his first semester at school so much that Mildred had decided to keep him at home again and a new tutor had been hired.

‘That’s a bit feeble, isn’t it?’ said his inquisitor. ‘Why don’t you make more effort to stick it out?’

‘It seemed a waste of time, sir. Did you ever go to school?’

Surely, I thought, he knew Paul too had suffered from asthma and had been kept at home! But then I saw that Cornelius had found the weak spot in Paul’s attack and was exposing it as politely as he knew how.

The amusement flared in Paul’s eyes. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I never went to school.’ There was a pause before he added: ‘Tell me more about it. What sort of things did they try to teach you?’

More agonizing minutes followed during which Cornelius was shown to be painfully ignorant in the fields of literature, history and the classics.

‘My God, what a barbarian!’ exclaimed Paul. ‘It’s plain to see
you
come from beyond the Allegheny Mountains! Don’t you have any interest in culture at all? What do you do with your spare time?’

‘My spare time, sir?’ said the unfortunate boy, looking inexplicably more nervous than ever.

‘Do you swim? Play tennis?’

‘The doctor doesn’t permit—’

‘Then what do you do? Sit and look at the wall all day?’

Cornelius stole a glance at me and blushed again. By this time I was suffering such agonies for him that it was a relief to seize the chance to escape.

‘If you’d rather be alone with Paul—’ I began but Paul interrupted me.

‘No, stay where you are, Sylvia, and don’t pretend you’re not just as
intrigued as I am by this reticence! Now, Cornelius – my God, that’s a terrible name for an adolescent boy to endure! I’m going to shorten it to Neil. Now, Neil, speak up! We’re waiting! What do you do in your spare time?’

‘I – I bet on the horses, sir.’

‘You WHAT!’

‘Oh sir, please don’t tell Mama! It’s not real money anyway – I only bet on paper.’

Paul started to laugh. Cornelius looked as if he wanted to crawl under the couch and die. I was in such a state of anguish and astonishment that I merely gaped at both of them.

‘Go on!’ said Paul, still highly amused. ‘Tell me more! Do you go to the race-track?’

‘Oh no, sir, Mama wouldn’t permit that. But once a week I get the train into Cincinnati and I buy a sports magazine and a racing paper. I follow other sports too, not just the horses, and I make bets on football teams in winter and baseball in summer. I’ve got a system – it’s worked out in charts with all the odds calculated. It really helps to pass the time.’

‘And what does your mother think you’re doing while you’re locked in your room being a secret gambler?’

‘She thinks I’m reading the classics. But there’s a very good book I found in the library which gives the plots of all the world’s greatest novels—’

‘Quite. How much money have you won on paper so far this year?’

‘Two hundred and seventy-three dollars, thirty-nine cents.’

‘Good God!’ To my enormous relief I saw Paul was more entertained than ever. ‘And you enjoy it, of course?’ he added casually as an afterthought.

‘Oh yes, sir, it’s exciting – in fact it’s really the only excitement I get … Cincinnati’s a fine city but it’s kind of dull back there in Velletria,’ said Cornelius, glancing wistfully out of the window at New York, and when he looked back at his great-uncle I saw their glances meet and lock in one long moment of absolute recognition.

[2]

Cornelius arrived on a Friday and on Saturday morning Paul took him downtown to show him the bank before leaving him to do some sightseeing. It was years since Cornelius had been in New York and on previous visits he had had no chance to wander around on his own. Before we all went to the theatre that evening to see
The Devil’s Disciple
, he told me he had gone to the top of the Tower of Metropolitan Life and had been very impressed with the electric elevators to the forty-fourth floor.

‘And what did you think of the view?’ I said, remembering that only the Woolworth Building offered a comparable view of the city.

‘Pretty good,’ said Cornelius, but I could tell that the highlight of his visit had been the journey up and down in the elevator.

‘Pretty interesting,’ was
his comment on
The Devil’s Disciple
but he proved quite unable to discuss it afterwards with Paul.

On Sunday we went to church at St George’s on Stuyvesant Square where Paul’s mother had always worshipped, and afterwards we paid a brief visit to the graveyard of Trinity where there was an ancient Van Zale tomb.

‘Kind of quaint,’ said Cornelius politely. ‘I guess in those days New York must have been almost a one-horse town.’

‘Just like Velletria!’ said Paul laughing, apparently undisturbed by Cornelius’ lack of interest in the past, and later that afternoon took him to tea with Elizabeth.

‘And what would you most like to do while you’re in New York, Cornelius?’ said Elizabeth, no doubt hoping for a response indicating interest in a museum or art gallery.

‘See Jack Dempsey fight Firpo on the fourteenth,’ said Cornelius promptly, ‘but unfortunately that’s the day I’m due to leave town.’

‘Stay on if you wish,’ said Paul. ‘I’ll get you a ticket. Who’s going to win?’

‘Dempsey, sir. I think he’ll knock Firpo out – probably in an early round.’

‘Let’s have a bet,’ said Paul while Elizabeth looked on with incredulous disapproval. ‘I’ll bet you five dollars Firpo will survive at least five rounds.’

‘I’ll bet you ten he won’t,’ said Cornelius, and he was right. Dempsey won in the second round.

‘Well, Neil,’ said Paul as he parted with ten dollars, ‘you’d better not tell your mother I’ve encouraged your gambling or she’ll never let you come here again.’ And the next day when it was time for Cornelius to return home he said: ‘Make good use of your new tutor, start taking some proper exercise and try to open a book occasionally. When you’re a little less of a barbarian you can pay me another visit.’

‘Oh Paul!’ I said, weak with relief as the train steamed out of the station. ‘Thank God you were pleased with him!’

Paul said nothing.

‘I thought he was delightful,’ I said as we walked back to the car. ‘He was so polite and well-mannered – and self-assured too when he got over his shyness. I think he’s going to be very attractive in a few years’ time. He really does have the sweetest smile.’

Paul was still silent.

‘What do you think?’ I said, unable to resist pressing him for an opinion.

‘I think he’s a very odd little boy,’ said Paul. ‘I shall wait with interest to see if he develops a passion for Latin and Greek.’

My heart sank. ‘But in view of Cornelius’ natural inclinations, isn’t that a little unlikely?’

‘The odds, as Cornelius himself would say, are certainly unfavourable. That’s why if he does develop a zest for the classics I shall know his ambition knows no bounds.’