The Rich Are Different (56 page)

There was plenty of money in the family but my father, being generous, spent pretty freely so that when he died there wasn’t too much left in the bank. All in all it was probably a good thing when my mother remarried quickly. My mother was a lovely lady, better connected than my father although I never once heard her make any derogatory remark about our Irish name, and she was slim and always looked very cool and read expensive fashion magazines whenever she wasn’t getting dressed up to go out. They don’t make ladies like that any more; nowadays nobody knows how to be idle with grace and beauty and style. She was the kind of woman who should have had daughters instead of three rowdy sons, but after Matt and Luke were born she had no more children, not even when she remarried.

My stepfather was a nice guy, generous and good-natured like my father but without my father’s tough streak. Of course being a stepfather’s a hard job, I realize that. He wanted us to like him so he turned a blind eye to our escapades until we were walking all over him. We liked him well enough, but we didn’t respect him and we never knew how well off we were in his care until he died and Uncle took charge.

My expulsion from military academy coincided with Luke and Matt’s simultaneous expulsion from school, but my mother was too distraught by my stepfather’s death to cope with us so she was relieved when my father’s younger brother, the sober industrious president of Sullivan Steel Foundries, arrived to sort us out.

Uncle took one look at us and decided we were steel bars who had to be welded very firmly into some kind of conventional shape. Luke and Matt were sent to different schools, both institutions run by Methodists, and I was given a one-way ticket to New York to earn my living. I was also given an introductory letter to a distant family connection, the son of my maternal grandmother’s second cousin, Mr Paul Cornelius Van Zale.

I’ll never forget the interview he gave me. It was an interrogation. I started out bullish and brazen and ended up contradicting myself, stammering and damned nearly weeping with humiliation. When I was finally reduced to a white-faced, sick-to-the-stomach, trembling young kid humbly silent in his presence he said shortly: ‘You’re a bright boy. It’s possible I can do something for you but I shall expect absolute obedience, total loyalty and more hard work than you can at present imagine. If you can’t face that—’

I said
I could. By that time I was in such a state I would have said anything, but he must have known that after years without discipline I would find the rewards of hard work addictively sweet. I grasped the chance he gave me, but although he always took a sharp interest in my progress we were never close friends until he took me with him to Europe after his daughter Vicky died. The seventeen-year gap in our ages began to close. He taught me how to play tennis. We swam and sailed together. I’ve no doubt all his intellectual friends had a hard time figuring out why he enjoyed my company, but the very reason why Paul and I got along so well was because we were so different. Anyway I think Paul often got bored with his intellectual friends and the effort of being so exquisitely civilized. When he was out with me he could just be one of the boys. He’d had a stuffy sort of upbringing from that old battle-axe of a mother of his, and in later life he found it a real luxury to bum around with someone like me and say ‘shit’ or ‘fuck’ without anyone having the vapours.

That was a side of Paul his women never saw.

I often wondered what Paul really thought of women. He had more success with them than any other man I knew, and I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why. He wasn’t tall. He wasn’t broad-shouldered or spectacularly well-muscled. He didn’t have much hair, although curiously women never seemed to notice that. Maybe that was because he was capable of spending ten minutes in front of a mirror while he arranged his front strand as cunningly as possible. He had cheerful dark eyes, a gap between his two front teeth and deep hard lines around his tough straight mouth. Some people thought he had an English accent but they were always the people who had never been to England. He spoke very fast and could out-talk anyone under the sun – a fact which could help explain why women so often ended up in bed with him, and of course he was charming to women, I’m not denying that. But the charm was like a light-switch which could be flicked on and off. Until I saw him fall apart under the pressures of his affair with Dinah Slade I had always wondered if he was capable of a truly spontaneous relationship with a woman.

His wealth alone would have made him a target for the gossip-mongers. His wealth combined with his spectacular success with women was enough to drive them crazy with curiosity, disbelief and just plain jealousy. No rumour was so wild that it couldn’t be tacked on to Paul Van Zale and passed off as gospel truth, and one member of a certain uptown club even asked me once if Paul was bisexual. Yet when I repeated this story to Paul in a fever of indignation, Paul just laughed. No rumour could faze him. As far as he was concerned all publicity was good publicity in his ceaseless efforts to get around the law that a private banker must never advertise.

‘But supposing people believe that kind of stuff?’ I said horrified.

‘How can they,’ he said placidly, ‘when it’s so patently untrue?’

And indeed he was so damned busy making a fortune and laying every woman in sight that he hardly had the time to step out with his own sex. I think the rumour began because there was a gap between what Paul said
and what he actually did. It was one of his nineteenth-century characteristics. He was quite capable of arguing in some intellectual discussion that the laws against homosexuals should be reformed and that it was irrelevant how people expressed themselves sexually, but in practice he made damned sure that all his close friends chased nothing but skirts. The most any queen could ever have expected from him was a cool handshake over a business deal.

He gave me some severe lectures about skirt-chasing when I was young but when I still managed to marry the wrong girl he helped me get the divorce and introduced me to Caroline. Caroline and I had always got along pretty well. We’d been married fourteen years so we had to be doing something right, and the only serious bone of contention between us was children. I wanted more and she was content with our two boys. However, as she herself said, if I’d had to spend nine months being pregnant, maybe my views would have coincided with hers. Caroline’s pet project was the dissemination of birth control literature to the poor, and she was always chasing around organizing groups of emancipated females who agreed with her that birth control was the only defence women had against a lifetime of oppression by lusty males. At first this had annoyed me but now I’d got used to it. Modern women were really kind of cute, and anyway every woman should have a hobby to keep her occupied.

Our two boys were the greatest little fellows in the world and well worth all the tussles and spats Caroline and I used to have. Scott was six years old and already very spunky with a baseball bat while Tony was three and could rip up the nursery in less time than it took to recite his favourite nursery rhyme. We had waited a long time to have children because Caroline hadn’t been able to face it, and she had only given in when our marriage was within an ace of running on to the rocks. Scott was planned but Tony was an accident – and Caroline, in between her speeches about birth control, never let me forget it. However, underneath all this tough talk she was devoted to both kids and always made sure they had nothing but the best. Even their nurse had once worked for European royalty.

Caroline was thirty-six, three years younger than I was, and looked smart as paint. She had black hair, black eyes, a sleek streamlined figure which always gave me a thrill whenever I prised it loose from those god-awful boyish-form corsets, and legs which made one want to praise God that women’s hemlines had finally risen to the knee. She was no fool either. She read
Vanity Fair
so she knew exactly what Frank Crowninshield’s intellectuals were saying, she played a steely game of bridge and she could arrange a dinner-party for sixty people without turning a hair. She kept my domestic life ruthlessly well-organized and had no patience with slackers.

‘Well, Steven!’ she said sternly, sweeping into my study at midnight to find me still sitting in front of my blank notepad. ‘Time to start rehearsals! Where’s the eulogy?’

‘It’s still an unwritten masterpiece. Fix me a drink, Cal.’

‘Oh darling, you
can’t
get drunk tonight and be hung over tomorrow at the funeral!’

‘Oh yeah?’

After I had crawled into my black suit next morning I took some salts for my stomach, added a slug of gin to my orange juice to wake me up, and set off for the funeral still with no idea what I was going to say.

The service was to be held at St George’s on Stuyvesant Square with a private interment later at the family mausoleum in Westchester.

Everyone was there, all Wall Street and half Washington, the big names, the famous firms, the men who like Paul were legends in their time. The twin aristocracies of New York, Jewish and Yankee, for once met and mingled for Paul had spanned both worlds in his long unorthodox career. Jacob Reischman – always ‘Young Jacob’ to Paul even though he was now in his mid-fifties – said: ‘I remember when he was very young and first came to our House …’ but someone younger said: ‘I can’t remember when I first met him because it seemed he was always there.’

‘And with us still,’ said someone else, and suddenly I knew that for once this was no empty platitude but the truth. For there was another contingent at the funeral, a group unrecognized by the press and unknown by the sightseeing crowds, a club only dimly acknowledged by Wall Street but just as exclusive as any club uptown.

Paul’s protégés had come to pay their final respects.

We all knew each other. I kept seeing them as the crowds swirled and parted like patterns in a kaleidoscope. Martin, Clay and I were the oldest and most successful, but there were others descending in age and achievement all the way to little Cornelius Blackett and his three eighteen-year-old friends.

Paul was dead but his people lived on, and I was just about to wallow in maudlin sentiment when I came face to face with the truth.

I saw Bruce Clayton. I never thought he’d have the nerve to come. He’d been formally arrested for Krasnov’s murder but had later been released and everyone knew the charges had been dropped. He was with his mother who was heavily veiled. I was just thinking I’d never seen anyone as pale as Bruce when I noticed his wife walking beside him.

He saw me, flinched and turned away.

Rage burst through me. I stared, still standing stock still, and as the kaleidoscope of people shifted again I saw Terence O’Reilly. Of course it would have looked odd if he had stayed away.

The shock of seeing the two of them in such rapid succession stripped the sentimentality from my eyes. Paul hadn’t been killed by strangers. He had been killed by two of his own people who had used the brains and ambition he had admired so much to plot a murder successful enough to outwit the law.

The full horror of his murder wiped my brain clean of muddle and grief. Facts like that were capable of only one resolution. Paul might have been killed by his people but he was also going to be avenged by them, and as I took a look into the blurred future I knew the power of his personality
would continue to manipulate us all from the darkness on the far side of the grave.

‘I know what I’m going to say,’ I said to Caroline.

‘Oh God, Steven, are you sure?’

The streets of the square were choked with cars. The sidewalks were overflowing with people and the photographers preceded us every step of the way into the church.

It was an old church, grave and cool. The organ was already playing and twenty minutes later the doors were closed.

I can’t remember the service. I only remember walking up to the lectern and facing the packed congregation. I looked out over the sea of faces and when the silence was so deep I could hear it I said in my strongest voice to Paul’s murderers:

‘He’s still alive!’

[6]

I stopped speaking. Some journalist wrote later that I had spoken for eight minutes. I felt as if I had been speaking for eight hours. When I stopped the silence was not only audible but thundering in my ears. I groped my way down from the lectern, and as the organ began to play the English hymn ‘Jerusalem’ I felt Sylvia’s hand seek mine.

I hadn’t heard that hymn since I was in England. It was a damned odd hymn and I’d always wondered what the hell it meant, but now as the voices of the choir soared to the rafters I knew I was in the presence of some idealistic vision, all the more romantic for being incomprehensible, and I saw again the hidden side of Paul, the side he tried to conceal even from those closest to him. Listening to that hymn which he himself had chosen I felt as if some line had opened up between us and my thoughts streamed out to meet him. I was watching some distant point above the altar. I neither moved nor spoke but in my head I was talking to Paul, apologizing for not taking immediate action against his murderers, telling him I was putting the bank first, just as he would have wished.

Sylvia was crying. I put an arm around her and drew her to me.

The service ended. Eventually a few people started to move. The sun shone through one of the windows. After a while I found I was standing in the aisle while people clustered around to shake my hand.

My partners looked wiped out. Even Lewis’s Hollywood profile seemed dented and Charley Blair was unable to speak as he wrung my hand. Clay was like a ghost, Martin was endlessly polishing his misted glasses, and Walter was like an old, old man who has lived too long and seen too much.

I had to break away from them to attend to Sylvia. After days of unnatural calm she had at last broken down completely.

‘Leave this to me, Steven,’ said Caroline competently, but Sylvia had already turned to Paul’s niece Mildred and there was nothing Caroline could do.