The Auerbach Will (45 page)

“Did you know that Mother's going to marry that man, Gee-Gee?” Linda says as Essie pours the tea. “That Daryl Carter?”

“No, I didn't,” Essie says. “Well, I suppose I should say I hope she'll be very happy.”

“He's a wimp,” Linda says, “but he's a nice enough wimp. Of course he's closer to my age than to hers.”

“Well, if he loves her—”

“I'm not so sure about the love bit,” Linda says. “But I'll say this for him. He's gotten on Mother's case about the drinking, and she's been looking a lot better.”

Essie glances at Linda out of the corner of her eye. “Good,” she says. “Good, because I did think Karen was drinking a bit too much.”

“She's an alcoholic, Gee-Gee—face it.”

“Well, dear, everything is relative.”

“He's gotten her to go to A.A. meetings. He goes with her.”

“Well, good,” Essie says.

“Of course I think it's a purely sexual thing with Mother. For her, Daryl is just a sex object.”

Essie hesitates. “Well, as long as he's kind to her,” she says.

Linda lifts her teacup to her lips and, in this little gesture, Essie sees another young girl lifting a teacup in a crimson parlor years ago. Yes, in Linda, there is something of the girl she had once scrutinized in her mother's hand mirror years ago, a definite resemblance. Funny that it would have skipped not just one but two generations, for Essie has never been able to see much of herself in any of her own children.

“I'm in a sexual relationship myself right now, Gee-Gee,” Linda says.

“Really?” Essie says. “Well, I suppose that's very common these days for girls your age, Linda. It wasn't in my day. We waited for marriage, but I'm willing to admit that times have changed. I suppose you're—as they say—on the pill.”

“Oh, naturally,” Linda says. “It's a boy in my class at Bennington.”

“Jewish?”

“Gosh, I don't have any idea. I've never asked him.”

“Well, even that doesn't make much difference anymore, does it? At least not in this family. If my father knew what's gone on in this family, he'd be spinning in his grave.”

“What was he like, Gee-Gee?”

Essie thinks to find the right words. “Stern. Pious. Scholarly. Rigid. Unforgiving.”

“Unforgiving? What was there to forgive?”

“Oh, plenty.” She nods towards Jake's portrait. “He didn't approve of my marriage, for one thing. He had another man all picked out.”

“Hmm. Well, frankly, I don't think it's all it's cracked up to be, Gee-Gee.”

“What isn't?”

“Sex. This sex business. I mean, what's there to it? I find it all kind of a big bore.”

“Ah,” Essie says. “I'm sorry to hear that, Linda.”

“Sorry? Why?”

“It shouldn't be a big bore. That's all.”

“What should it be?”

“Well,” Essie says, again choosing her words carefully, for this is not the kind of conversation she had been prepared to have this particular afternoon, and thinking that Linda must have some motive for the direction their talk is taking, and wondering whether—perhaps—her great-granddaughter has come to her as some sort of oracle possessed of the great wisdom that is supposed to come, but rarely does, with old age. “I can only speak of my own case,” she says. “I've always felt that when you love someone, sex can be a very beautiful part of life. When you're really close to someone, when you're like—well, like one soul, not two. The beautiful thing about it is that there are no words for it. When it's over, there's not much that you and your lover can say about it. You laugh a little. You touch each other a little. Then you get up and go about your day as usual, but just feeling a little better. There's nothing to discuss, because there are no words, no language for it. I've always thought of sex as a kind of love poetry without words.”

“Hmm,” Linda says, frowning into her teacup.

“And so I suspect that you are not very much in love with this young man.”

“That's true. I'm not.”

“Then sex won't mean much, and what's the point of it? At least that's what I say.”
I want to replace my little Prince
, she thinks. “I had another son,” she says.

“What?”

“Never mind. Woolgathering. Anyway, that's what I say.”

“But I suppose it goes away in time, doesn't it—sex?”

Essie laughs. “Oh, no. It doesn't go away. It just gets—lovelier.”

“But not at your age, Gee-Gee!”

“Oh, yes. Why not? As you get older, it gets lovelier—softer, more tender—because there are less distractions. Like worrying about getting pregnant, for example. It becomes more concentrated, less—cluttered up, I guess is the expression. No, I have as much sexual drive, as they say, at eighty-nine as I did at eighteen.”

“That's incredible, Gee-Gee!”

“Incredible, but true. Remember you heard it here. More tea?”

Linda offers her empty teacup and changes the subject. “Grandma says that that Arthur Litton, who died, was some sort of relative of ours.”

“He was my brother.”

“Ah, Gee-Gee, I'm sorry.”

“Don't be. He was not a nice man.”

“What did he do?”

“I don't want to talk about it. Tell me, how is Joan getting along?”

“She's talking about reorganizing the newspaper.”

“Honestly,” Essie says, setting down her teacup. “I simply do not understand your grandmother. She's my own daughter, and I cannot understand her. Can you explain her to me? She talks about going broke, and owing money all over town—and she and her sister aren't speaking because she owes money to Babette. But she still drives around town in a chauffeur-driven car, still has her butler, her cook—how do you explain that?”

“We think she's found a new angel.”

“Well, she'd better pay back some of the old angels first,” Essie says.

“I know she's hired a fancy new Madison Avenue lawyer who's handling her affairs. He's ‘investigating certain improprieties,' she says.”

“Huh! She'd better straighten out her own improprieties first.”

“Well, I don't pay too much attention to all the capitalist talk,” Linda says, adding casually, “I've become a Marxist, did I tell you?”

“No! Well, stranger things have happened in this family. I once marched in a children's strike on the Lower East Side.”

“Hmm,” Linda says, crushing her lemon slice to a pulp with the tip of her teaspoon at the bottom of the cup. “It was interesting what you had to say about sex, Gee-Gee. Even at your age.”

“Yes,” Essie winks. “Even at my age, Linda.”

“Interesting.” She continues to worry and poke at what remains of her lemon slice. “And it would be interesting to know what would have happened to his family if Great-Grandpa hadn't made all that money.”

“That's the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question!” Essie whoops.

Interesting. Yes. “It's just that I'm
weary
of them, Charles,” she had said to him several years ago. “It's not that I don't love my children, but I'm weary of them coming back to me, again and again, demanding this or that. I wanted nice children—not
dependents
. Why haven't they learned to take care of themselves, to have responsibilities? Why haven't they learned that? Was there just too much money?”

“Josh learned it.”

“I admit I tried to raise him differently. No bodyguards. No nannies. I guess I thought the others had examples of strong, independent, responsible people all around them. You, me, Jake—even Daisy. No one was more independent than Daisy! I guess I made a lot of wrong assumptions.”

It was the year that Joan had married Richard McAllister and, with him, was trying to get her newspaper started, and had succeeded in extracting $250,000 out of Essie for that project, even though it was less than half the figure Joan wanted. Looking back, after this latest debacle, Essie has decided that she should have given her nothing.

In the years following Prince's death, Jake had begun taking long trips to distant places. The 1920s had been the years of the company's most vigorous expansion, and much of this travel had been in connection with that, though Essie suspected that much of it was also a kind of miserable self-exile. Often he didn't tell her of the imminence of these trips, or their duration, though Charles was always careful to keep her informed of her husband's whereabouts. At some point in their lives, though Essie could not tell you precisely where, there had been an almost-audible
snap!
in their married existence, and Essie no longer cared that they now led essentially separate lives, and she would hear with equanimity that her husband was in the Far East, in Tokyo, where he would be dining with young Emperor Hirohito, or that he was in Belgium, where he would confer with the king about a new plant there, or that he was in Hawaii, battling with American Factors, Inc., and threatening to build his own steamship line when there was some question as to whether Matson Navigation would agree to ship goods to the Islands which would compete with another Big Five enterprise—American Factors' Liberty House department store—or that Eaton & Cromwell had sold 50,000 refrigerators in the year 1926, as opposed to 27,000 the year before. Sometimes it was necessary for Charles to accompany him on these travels. At other times, the always-obliging Daisy was his escort. For some reason—his odd sense of propriety, perhaps—he never requested that both Charles and Daisy join his entourage at the same time, though there were times when both Essie and Daisy were invited to join him. For such trips, Daisy's role was that of “close family friend.”

Daisy's position in the Auerbach household was by now so secure that her companionship was no longer a subject for discussion within the family—though, outside of it, who knew? At home, she was simply Aunt Daisy. On the passenger lists of the ships on which she traveled with Jake, Daisy was always listed as “Private Secretary,” and had her own stateroom, though she no longer performed any secretarial chores. Though she frequently spent weekends at The Bluff, even when Jake was away, where she had her own suite of rooms, she had also been provided with a comfortable apartment at 1430 Lake Shore Drive. “Appearances” were thereby observed. Were there also other women? Who knew? There were whispers to that effect. Obviously, this was something Essie and Daisy never discussed and, ah, the power of money to suppress gossip and malicious talk! In some ways, Essie had begun to see hers as a household like that of a Chinese aristocrat, in which Daisy Stevens was Number One Concubine, with all the privileges thereunto entailed. If there were numbers Two or Three or even more they did not intrude. The charm of Daisy—perhaps that was what kept Jake attracted to her—was that she never lost her temper, never complained, never made demands. As for Essie, she was simply, officially, Mrs. Jacob Auerbach, Number One Wife, patroness of the arts, with all the privileges thereunto entailed. It was an arrangement that worked. What more can be said?

And, needless to say, Essie came to welcome the times when Daisy was chosen as her husband's companion on his travels. It made her meetings with Charles easier to arrange.

It was in this period, too—the years between 1924 and 1929—that Jake Auerbach began expanding his personal scale of living. Perhaps because The Bluff evoked bitter memories, there were now additional residences required—a small,
pied-à-terre
apartment in New York at the new Hotel Pierre, a big house at Seagirt, on the New Jersey shore, not far from where his parents had once had a place at Elberon (he preferred Seagirt to Elberon, because Elberon was already being called “the Jewish Newport”), and a large camp, with many outbuildings, on Saranac Lake in the Adirondacks, where he liked to spend the month of August. Unless there was a special reason for her to be at his side as hostess, a command performance—a dinner for a head of state, or a visit from a celebrity such as Horace Dodge, Charles Lindbergh, or Mr. and Mrs. Douglas Fairbanks—Essie herself spent little time at these places. While her husband preferred to banish Prince's memory from The Bluff, she preferred to keep it alive in her walks through her gardens, though the idea of replacing him had not yet occurred to her.

“Weary of them,” she had repeated to him that afternoon after completing the financial paperwork with Joan. “I thought the point of children was to take care of you in your old age. Not to have to keep taking care of them until they're middle-aged and older. Dependents. You're lucky you never had children, Charles.”

What was the year Joan started the
Express?
Nineteen seventy-one or seventy-two. Essie could look it up.

“You made me independent, Essie.”

“Oh, well. That was long ago.”

They had been in her bedroom at The Bluff, she remembers, and it was a late autumn afternoon. Outside, the surface of the swimming pool was scattered with fallen leaves. Emboldened by the fact that Jake was traveling in Germany, where he had gone to appraise the deteriorating political situation and to decide what its effects might be on Eaton's; that Joan was honeymooning in Arizona with her second husband, who would become Karen's father; that Babette was off for her freshman year at Smith; and that Mogie was visiting his grandmother Auerbach in New York—emboldened by these circumstances, they had not bothered to meet at the Palmer House apartment. Instead, he had come to The Bluff, and Essie remembers that it was a Sunday. Essie was giving him a back-rub, which he liked because he said it relaxed him and because, that afternoon, she had thought that he did not look well. Suddenly, beneath her fingers, she felt the muscles of his shoulders begin to twitch and quiver. She turned his body to face her. “Are you all right, Charles?”

His face was pale, and his forehead was beaded with perspiration.