‘What extraordinary questions you ask sometimes, Cornelius! Yes, with girls. Why shove a key down a crack when it’ll fit in
the lock?’
I relaxed, smothering a gasp of relief. That was my boy talking at last, sane practical normal Scott with his firm grip on
the realities of life. I got nervous when he became too highbrow to make sense.
‘I kind of worry about you sometimes, Scott!’ I said smiling at him.
‘Yeah?’
‘Yeah.’ I looked down at the board and saw he had blocked the brilliant move I had planned for my queen. ‘But I don’t have
to worry about you,’ I said, glancing up sharply at him, ‘do I?’
‘No, Cornelius,’ he said, returning my smile. ‘You don’t have to worry about me.’
There was a long silence while I studied the mystery of the board
between us but finally I heard myself say: ‘I may seem sometimes to be sentimental, Scott, but basically I’m a practical man.
You do understand that, don’t you?’
‘Why, of course!’ said Scott, looking surprised that I should ask such an inane question. ‘Like Byron, you’re interested in
“things really as they are, not as they ought to be.”’
‘Byron said that?’
‘In
Don Juan
, yes.’
‘I never thought a poet could be that smart!’ I said, fully relaxing at last, and shot my bishop sideways to win the game.
[1]
It took us some time to settle down again after the drama of Eric Keller’s arrival in the world, but we managed it in the
end. The central character in the drama grew out of his first set of clothes, ate, smiled and did what he was supposed to
do. All the women in the family made regular pilgrimages to the crib, Sam wore out a camera taking photographs and Vicky imported
an English nurse to change the diapers while she bought herself a new wardrobe of clothes and began to read detective stories.
She claimed these books were full of social significance although this seemed unlikely; I suspected she just said that in
order to back down gracefully from her earlier pose of being an intellectual, but as I told her on more than one occasion,
she didn’t have to convince
me
that Raymond Chandler was more fun to read than Jean-Paul Sartre.
‘Women weren’t meant to be intellectuals anyway,’ I observed later to Teresa. I was thinking less of Vicky than of my mother
and sister, both of whom had inherited intellectual tastes. ‘You can educate them to the hilt but all they truly want to be
is wives and mothers – unless they’re artists, of course. Artists are the exceptions that prove the rule, but they’re not
normal.’
‘Thanks a lot!’
‘Well, what I mean is—’
‘Stop right there, honey,’ said Teresa good-naturedly, ‘before I slug you over the head with the ketchup bottle.’
I obediently kept quiet but I couldn’t help thinking what a relief it was that Vicky had turned out like Emily. Supposing
by some freak of nature Vicky had turned out to be an artist like Teresa! Or supposing – and this was much more likely – Vicky
had turned into a nymphomaniac like Vivienne! I shuddered at the thought. However, even Vivienne had felt the urge to be a
wife and mother in the end. It hadn’t lasted, of course, but it proved my point that all women except artists were instinctively
attracted by domesticity.
I had one thing in common with my sister Emily: a talent for raising children. I knew I had probably been too indulgent too
often with Vicky, but at least she had always known I was intensely concerned about her welfare, and children not only have
to be loved; they have to feel their parents care enough to take positive action on their behalf. Vicky might have had her
troubles in the past, but as I could see for myself and as everyone nowadays was always telling me, she had turned out wonderfully
well. I had also had trouble in the past with my stepsons, but now they too were a credit to me. Sebastian had graduated
summa cum laude
from Harvard and Andrew was already an officer in the air force. Of course we had all had our occasional difficulties, but
our family life with its stresses and strains alternating with long periods of happy tranquillity was probably very normal,
and having applied myself successfully to the challenge of being a good father I was more than willing to apply myself to
the task of being an affectionate but sensible grandparent.
I was determined not to make a fool of myself. The scenes after Eric’s birth had taught me a lesson, and nowadays I took scrupulous
care to behave well in the nursery. It was true I did call at the Kellers’ house two or three times during the working week
and it was true I always brought some sort of little gift with me, but I never stayed more than ten minutes and I never spent
more than five dollars. On alternate Saturdays Eric visited us at Fifth Avenue, but I never made a big fuss over the occasion,
and if the visit had to be cancelled I just said: ‘Well, that’s too bad,’ and never referred to it again. I took a few photographs
but not many; I played with him in the nursery, but not too often; and when Alicia said kindly: ‘Isn’t he cute!’ I just said:
‘Yes, he’s okay.’
On the Saturdays when Eric didn’t visit us he went to see Vivienne, now established not in Queens but in a plush apartment
complex in Westchester. Sam had told Vicky that it was in Eric’s best interests that Vivienne should live in a high-class
neighbourhood, and Vicky hadn’t argued with him. Neither had I. I never interfered, never complained, although I knew the
mere sight of her
mother always upset Vicky. But Sam was the boss. It was his family and Vivienne was his problem. I just went right on being
the model grandfather and took care to keep well out of Vivienne’s way.
In April 1952 Eric celebrated his second birthday. He was tall for his age and sturdy. He had fair curly hair which Vicky
allowed to grow too long, but again I never criticized or interfered. His dark eyes made him look more like Sam than he really
was. He talked coherently. Of course he was very smart. I bought him a huge stuffed giraffe, a tank with a rotating gun and
one of those toys with wooden pegs which you have to smash through a holed board with a hammer. I knew I should only have
brought one present, but a second birthday was an important occasion, and besides I had been behaving so well that I thought
I could indulge myself for once.
Vivienne was at the birthday party. She brought six presents, all useless, and cooed over the little kid until I wanted to
vomit. Alicia and I left early.
The party was on a Sunday. On Monday morning at nine o’clock Sam came to my office and suggested we had a drink together that
evening to work out the family problem.
‘What problem?’ I said blankly.
He looked at me as if he found it hard to believe I was serious. All he said was: ‘I have a meeting midtown this afternoon.
I’ll meet you in the King Cole Bar of the St Regis at six.’
Automatically I gave the natural friendly response. ‘Come and have a drink with me at home!’
‘No, Neil,’ he said. ‘I think it would be best if we met on neutral ground.’
I felt as if an earthquake had blasted through my office and split the ground beneath my feet. This was a power-play. Sam
was slipping me into a vice.
‘Okay, sure,’ I said casually, and pretended to return to work.
I spent the whole day trying to figure out what was coming. Three times I nearly called Vicky and three times I decided against
it. It was just possible that Vicky knew nothing about this so-called problem but if she did I might upset her by any cross-examination,
and once I upset Vicky I would be playing into Sam’s hands.
I tried to clamp down on my panic but horrific thoughts were already crawling out of the darkest corners of my mind into the
light of day. Was this perhaps the long delayed stab in the back for snitching Teresa? No, that was surely impossible since
Sam was still crazy about Vicky, and Teresa had long since ceased to be important to him. But in that case what the hell was
he up to?
I went on sitting at my desk and occasionally, about every ten minutes, I groaned. I had an absurd longing to rush upstairs
to Sam’s office, grab him by the sleeve and plead: ‘Don’t do it, Sam! Whatever it is, don’t do it!’
I thought to myself: I wish I was back in the old days again. I wish I was back in the summer of ’29 when Sam and I sowed
our wild oats and got drunk on bathtub gin and danced to ‘Alexander’s Ragtime Band’.
I pulled myself together. Nostalgia would get me nowhere. To be sentimental would be to play a losing game. I had to pussyfoot
forward stealthily with my eyes skinned for trouble and if Sam tried a swipe at me I’d disarm him at once and cuff him for
being such a fool.
But Sam wasn’t a fool. He wouldn’t try a swipe at me unless he was sure he had me by the—
‘Oh God!’ I said, and headed for the liquor cabinet, but I never fixed myself a drink. This was not the time to go hitting
the bottle. I could do that later after Sam had revealed his hand, and his hand was probably just some gripe about how I was
giving Eric too many presents. I was being neurotic, trying to turn my best friend into some kind of assassin and imagining
I had a guilty conscience. My conscience was clear. Teresa had been through with Sam. I had sincerely believed Sam was no
longer interested in her. Teresa had more or less invited me to go to bed with her. I had been the seduced, not the seducer,
the victim of a gross misunderstanding.
Just who do you think you’re kidding, Cornelius! That was the way things ought to have been, but was that the way things really
were?
‘I guess you’ve been to my art gallery, Teresa.’
‘Sure. The exhibitions there are great.’
‘Well, of course I’m very careful whom I exhibit. I have to think very highly of an artist before I consider exhibiting him
… or her …’
The truth was that I had had power and used it. Teresa, flat broke, emotionally muddled and worried sick about her work, hadn’t
stood a chance.
‘I’m sorry, Cornelius – I didn’t mean to tell him about the exhibition, but he wanted to buy one of my pictures …’
I hadn’t wanted Sam to know about the exhibition so soon. I had wanted a decent interval to elapse to blur the connection
between the bedroom and the exhibition hall, but there had been no interval, only an unpleasant progression from one sordid
fact to the next. Sam could have drawn only one conclusion from such an unpalatable set of facts, but he had said nothing
and even later at the exhibition he had given
no hint that he resented what I’d done. Afterwards I’d wished he had. I’d had a set speech well prepared. ‘Because of my personal
troubles I wanted her very much and this was the only way I felt I could reach her – by appealing to her through her art …’
That statement would have made my acquisition of Teresa seem less like a commercial transaction and more like the foolish
muddled act of a man distracted by misery; that statement, nauseous though it might still have seemed to Sam, at least had
the virtue of being true.
However, no excuses could alter the fact that I had made a seamy proposition which hadn’t been refused. Would Teresa have
slept with me if I hadn’t made her that irresistible offer? Maybe. But maybe not. Since she and I had now been good friends
for three years I had thought the origins of our affair no longer mattered, but perhaps I’d been wrong. Maybe they did still
matter. Maybe Sam had been far more hurt by my ill-timed acquisition than I had ever wanted to believe.
At half-past five, feeling as if the day of judgement was about to dawn, I left the office, crawled into my new Cadillac which
was appropriately as black as a hearse, and headed uptown to the St Regis.
[2]
The King Cole Bar of the St Regis Hotel is a huge well-lit room ideally suited to be a neutral meeting-place for two bankers
who would normally drink together at the Knickerbocker Club. The enormous bar snakes along one wall beneath the famous murals
of King Cole by Maxwell Parrish and the tables are set well apart so that eavesdropping is difficult even when the room is
quiet and uncrowded. Sam had picked his battle-ground well.
I had planned to be ten minutes late but to my great annoyance I was still the first to arrive, and not wanting to lose face
by sitting around waiting for him I headed immediately to the men’s room. The first person I saw when I walked in was Sam.
He was washing his hands, like a surgeon preparing for a big operation, and glancing at his watch. We laughed when we saw
each other, and I thought: first round a draw.
‘What are you drinking?’ he said when we were finally seated at a table and the waiter was hovering near by.
I had already decided that I had to signal my complete lack of nervousness. ‘I’ll have a tomato juice,’ I said smiling, and
thought: that’ll rattle him.
‘One tomato juice, one gimlet,’ he said to the waiter, and I knew the second round had gone to me. He couldn’t face me without
a shot of gin.
However by the time the drinks arrived I was wishing I had ordered a limejuice on the rocks so that I could have switched
drinks with him while he was looking the other way. I was sure my need for gin was greater than his.
‘So what’s the problem, Sam?’ I said after he had finished telling me about his afternoon meeting with the president of Hammaco,
a huge corporation which had foolishly slighted us in the past only to discover the enormity of their mistake. I took a sip
of the thick sickly juice in my glass and wondered if any vegetable could be drearier than a squeezed tomato. ‘Let’s have
it!’ I said encouragingly. ‘Cards on the table!’
‘Vicky’s at the end of her rope,’ he said promptly and lit a cigarette. He knew I hated people smoking in close proximity
to me. Third round to him.
‘Vicky? At the end of her rope?’ Of course he was exaggerating. ‘But why?’ I said. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘She says she can’t stand the tug of war any longer.’
‘Tug of war?’ I said, suppressing the instant recollection of Vivienne’s lavish presents coupled with my gifts from F. A.
O. Schwartz.
‘Don’t be dumb, Neil,’ said Sam, no longer smiling. ‘You’re not scoring any points by acting ignorant.’
Fourth round to him. I pulled myself together. At least all this had nothing to do with Teresa. ‘Can you conceivably be referring
to Eric?’ I said cheerfully.
‘You bet I am! You and Alicia on one side, Vivienne on the other and the three of you always in and out of my house, spoiling
my kid rotten and trying to tell Vicky how to bring up our son.’
‘Sam, Alicia and I have never—’
‘The point isn’t whether or not the three of you actually dictate orders. The point is that Vicky believes that you do. Vicky
feels intimidated and miserable. Remember she’s still little more than a kid herself and she can’t cope with all these adults
muscling in on her territory with – quote – helpful – unquote – advice.’
‘Don’t pretend you haven’t got your own axe to grind too, Sam! This isn’t just Vicky’s problem, is it?’
‘Okay,’ he said. ‘I’ll admit it. I don’t like you trying to take over my son and treating him as if he was yours. It would
be different if you were a regular old grandpa of sixty-plus and I was a young kid in my
twenties. Then I’d just say: gee, the poor old senior citizen, I’ve got to give him some pleasure in life. But we’re the same
age – and not only the same age. We’ve got this whole shared past which has shackled us together more tightly than any blood-tie.
Sometimes I think you’re like my
Doppelgänger
, and that’s eerie, I don’t like it, I can take seeing you every day at the bank but I don’t want to see you constantly in
my own home as well. In other words I want you to get the hell out of my private life, Neil. You’re being too goddamned intrusive,
and let’s be honest, let’s voice a truth we both know: since I married Vicky, you don’t own me any more.’