The Rich Are Different (88 page)

‘Am I going to be ill for weeks?’ I demanded.

‘Oh, I shouldn’t think that’s likely, Mr Van Zale. Whereabouts in your head is the pain located?’

‘Everywhere. Particularly the right side. Is it some sort of stroke? A cerebral haemorrhage?’

‘I doubt it, Mr Van Zale, since you’re in full possession of your faculties. Is your neck stiff?’

‘Yes, that hurts too.’

He started feeling behind my ears and prodding below my jaw.

‘Ouch!’ Twisting away from him I pressed my hand against my neck,
and when my fingers touched a lump behind my ear I froze. I had read somewhere that one of the most horrible diseases known to man could begin in the form of lumps in the head and neck.

‘Is it cancer?’ I said wildly.

‘No, Mr Van Zale. Open your mouth, please. Wider. Wider still … ah! Yes, I thought so.’

I had cried out in pain. Something had happened to my salivary glands. I pressed my tongue against them in agony and insisted that he told me truthfully how long I had to live.

‘Probably another fifty years,’ said Dr Wilkins politely, folding his stethoscope and taking out his prescription pad. ‘You have mumps, Mr Van Zale. I’ll give you something for the pain.’

‘Mumps!’ I was outraged. ‘That’s a kid’s disease!’

‘Yes, and it can be very unpleasant for adults. You must stay in bed for at least a week and on no account should you get up even when your fever subsides.’

‘But I have my work! I’ve got to get back to the office! Surely if I have no fever—’

‘Mr Van Zale,’ said Dr Wilkins charmingly, ‘do you really want to run the risk of encephalitis? Of course the brain damage in mumps cases is always reversible, but I assure you it’s the most unpleasant complication.’

I sank back on to my pillows.

Unfortunately my ordeal had hardly begun. My fever continued and my discomfort increased. The right side of my face became swollen until I looked like a circus freak; flesh swung pendulously from my jaw. I could no longer open my mouth and all consumption of solid food was impossible. My most striking accomplishment lay in sucking liquid through a straw. I was just thinking in agony how fortunate it was that only one side of my face was affected when I felt the lumps swell behind my other ear and knew the left side of my face too was doomed.

For a long time I refused to let anyone but my valet see me, but eventually Alicia forced her way in.

‘
Cornelius!
’ She was horrified.

I tried to open my mouth. My salivary glands screamed. Wincing I prayed for the pain to die away, but it was several seconds before I could reach for my pad and pencil to conduct the conversation. Of course I was quite unable to talk.

‘I don’t know whether I should tell you this,’ said Alicia, ‘but I’ve been talking to Emily and she says you must have caught it from Tony. I hope you can forgive him.’

I wrote: ‘I’ll skin him alive!’ but I could neither laugh nor smile. It was too painful.

Presently the swelling on my right side subsided and I was just thinking with relief that I was on the road to recovery, when I awoke one night with a searing pain in the groin.

I had never been more frightened in my life. Old Wilkins was hauled out
of bed and chauffeured to my door. One of the nicest things about being rich is that a doctor is always available in a crisis.

‘I’m going to be impotent,’ I said sweating, ‘aren’t I?’

‘No, Mr Van Zale,’ said Dr Wilkins. ‘I give you my word that you will not be impotent as the result of this illness.’

I did not believe him. I was in despair. ‘Does this happen often with mumps?’

‘It’s not uncommon.’ He was writing another prescription for the pain.

‘You’ve had other patients with this complication?’

‘Several.’

‘And can you solemnly promise me that each one was capable of sexual intercourse afterwards?’

‘They even fathered children.’ He took pity on me and gave me a thin smile. ‘It could be worse, you know,’ he said kindly. ‘You do have two testicles.’

I blanched as he left the room.

‘This is a dreadful disease!’ I cried afterwards to Alicia. ‘I never knew it could attack the genitals! Why does no one ever tell you these things?’

‘You had a sheltered upbringing, Cornelius. I did too, I guess, but I remember Ralph saying once that it could make men impotent. Isn’t it nice to know he was wrong?’

I dreamt of castration. Wilkins called daily and became so annoyed that I refused to believe his assurances that he himself offered to call in a second opinion. Realizing that I was behaving like a coward I declined.

The next day the other testicle became affected.

‘Well, you’re certainly having a bad time,’ said Dr Wilkins, scribbling nonchalantly on his prescription pad. ‘But perhaps this is better than encephalitis or damage to the pancreas. Has your wife bought a new nightgown yet to celebrate the end of your convalescence?’

I hated him. When he had gone I turned my face to the wall and didn’t speak for twelve hours. It was the nadir of my illness.

Two days later I began to improve and within a week I began to feel there might after all be hope for the future. Long dreary days of convalescence passed while I became increasingly nervous and examined myself with minute care in the bathroom (I couldn’t quite summon the courage to masturbate) but at last I was pronounced fit and the moment of truth arrived. The night before I was due to return to work Alicia arrayed herself in a black satin night-gown, forced me to drink two glasses of champagne and beckoned me into bed.

‘I know I’m going to be impotent,’ I muttered. ‘My balls have shrunk.’

‘Nonsense, Cornelius, how could they? They just seem that way because they’ve been swollen to twice their normal size.’

‘But supposing I’m little better than a eunuch?’

‘Oh, do stop being so silly, darling! You’re just saying that to spite Dr Wilkins.’

I laughed, and as I gazed at Alicia through the haze of champagne I
thought I had never seen her look more beautiful. She had a neat exquisite body with slim legs and hips, white unblemished skin and small, round, firm breasts.

‘God, what hell it is to be celibate!’ I cried with passion, and promptly forgot the mumps.

My ordeal was over, and when I reached the office the next day I was in such high spirits that I even accepted Steve’s offer of a drink when he arrived with the news that Emily had given birth to a daughter.

‘To my niece!’ I said, raising my glass to his with a smile, and it was only when he smiled back saying: ‘My daughter!’ that I wondered if he were still corresponding with Dinah Slade.

[1]

On my return from my honeymoon I had planned to tell Steve what Emily herself had felt unable to say: that he was not to humiliate her by adopting Miss Slade as a pen-pal. Because of my illness this conversation never took place and before my return to the office Emily had already informed me that she and Steve had settled the matter and that I was on no account to mention Miss Slade to him.

I might have disregarded this order, but there were so many matters demanding my attention when I returned to work that I took her words at their face value – a value which, as I later realized, was nil. I ought to have guessed that Steve, hating to see Emily upset as much as I did, had decided to keep his English correspondence to himself.

Matters might have turned out differently if only I hadn’t been entombed for weeks with that disgusting disease.

The mumps had also removed me from the financial arena, and it was depressing to return to the bank and find the economic picture was bleaker than ever. I had read the papers daily during my convalescence, but their pathetic optimism, geared to repair the broken American spirit, hardly reflected the long-term prognosis which Martin Cookson was only too willing to give me. That summer a series of banking failures swept Europe as the tidal wave of the Wall Street Crash inundated European shores, and the economic structure of the world tottered. In September another landmark was wiped out; the British pound went off the gold standard, and one look at my partners’ faces told me exactly how a tribunal of the Spanish Inquisition would have greeted the news of some fearful new heresy.

America clung to the gold standard, but within six months the gold reserve was cut in half and new unthinkable national nightmares were hovering in the wings.

‘My God, are
we never going to hit rock-bottom?’ said Sam appalled.

But people were beginning to have a clearer idea of what rock-bottom was. Between April and September American industry began to unravel, production falling, payrolls contracting, construction contracts cut by a third. The streets were choked with the unemployed. I used to see them waiting for a free meal, the line stretching block after block, as I rode downtown every day in my Cadillac to the bank at Willow and Wall.

‘Increase the charity donations,’ I ordered my chief aide, and to Alicia I said: ‘We must do something about the poor.’

We gave a charity ball and I doubled the amount raised out of my own pocket, but I was almost wondering if I too ought to tighten my belt. The investment bankers’ market was drying up. It was hardly the right moment to launch new schemes for capital investment, and the number of issues was dwindling.

The one bright spot in this depressing landscape was that at long last I managed to see my daughter. My personal lawyers had been dozing during my illness and when I found no progress had been made in the custody struggle I fired them and hired a new firm. Soon I won permission to see my daughter but Vivienne, who was still in Florida, took no notice of the New York ruling. I was on the point of heading for Key West with a full entourage of lawyers when Emily achieved a great coup by persuading Vivienne to soften her attitude.

Emily had taken care to remain on speaking terms with Vivienne; now she reaped the reward of her far-sighted diplomacy. Although Vivienne declined the kind invitation to the christening of Emily’s baby, she agreed that Vicky could travel north with her nurse to spend one week with her aunt Emily on Long Island. The only condition Vivienne set to the bargain was that my child was under no circumstances to cross the threshold of my home.

Vicky was nine months old. When I walked into the nursery she glanced up from her toys and I looked into my own grey eyes. She had just enough curly blonde hair to support a pink bow.

‘Vicky!’

She smiled absent-mindedly, crawled to the edge of the rug to retrieve a block and returned to build a new castle.

Sitting down crosslegged on the floor I watched her in silence and soon she became sufficiently interested to bash her blocks aside and clamber into my lap. Nervousness overcame me. I was afraid of scaring her by a careless move but eventually I summoned the courage to give her a hug.

She gurgled and pulled my ear hard. When I shook my head vigorously we both laughed.

‘My, what a talent you have for children, Cornelius!’ said Emily impressed.

Alicia turned away without a word, and I knew she was thinking of the little boy she had never seen.

‘We’re going to re-open this whole custody mess,’ I said to her afterwards. ‘There’s no reason on earth why you shouldn’t see your boys
sometimes. I’ll arm my new lawyers to the teeth and send them out into the field with their guns blazing.’

My lawyers blazed away obediently but it was uphill work and the opposition was still fierce. They were still wrangling when my attention became diverted by the Banking and Currency Committee of the Senate. President Hoover, convinced that the sickliness of the stock market was the deliberately engineered result of a small group of men who were selling short, had become determined to assume the role of scalp-hunter on Wall Street.

It was the end of another era, the era when Wall Street had had Washington in its hip pocket. Gone was Morgan’s famous direct line to the White House. Wall Street’s power was on the ebb. When the Senate formally authorized the Banking and Currency Committee to investigate Wall Street, a group of bankers including Lamont of Morgan’s protested to the president but Hoover showed them the door. In the midst of this icy struggle a rumour flew around that there was a French plot to force America off the gold standard, and the market crashed sickeningly. Unemployment was coasting smoothly towards ten million with no ceiling in sight. Gold was rushing away like water cascading down a drain. Industrial stocks were down to a fifth of their 1929 peak and were still falling. It was said that Americans were hoarding coins under their beds.

It was 1932 and the four horsemen of the Apocalypse were Deflation, Demoralization, Destitution and Despair. It was also an election year and Hoover, aware of the failure of his policy not to interfere with the economy, was scrabbling for new ways to boost his reputation.

Far away at the back of my mind I could remember Martin Cookson prophesying that one day the public would demand a scapegoat for the débâcle of 1929 and decide that the ideal candidates for the role were the investment bankers.

At the start of the Wall Street investigation, when the Senate merely empowered the Committee to investigate short-selling, we all sighed with relief. Richard Whitney, the Morgan broker and President of the Exchange, could handle that. It was true there were certain unpleasant senators such as Brookhart of Iowa who threatened legislation which would put an investment banker in the penitentiary for pegging the price of a security on the Stock Exchange while unloading it on the public, but we preferred not to listen to him.

‘Cheap bloodlust,’ said Lewis disdainfully, ‘is so very unattractive in politicians.’

The inquiry crept on. In the April and May of 1932 the nasty practices of pool operators began to come to light, and as the senators prised up stone after stone of the market graveyard everyone watched as the slugs crawled into the light of day. The climax came when Walter Sachs of Goldman, Sachs, one of the leading investment banks, was cross-examined about the questionable practices of his company’s investment affiliates. A shudder ran through the investment banking community and a partners’ meeting was held at Van Zale’s.