The Auerbach Will (46 page)

“I'm all right.… It's just …”

She covered his forehead with her hand. “I think you have a fever,” she said, even though his skin was strangely cold to the touch.

“No … no …” But now his hands were shaking violently, and he seemed to be having trouble speaking. His jaw was clenched, and the chords on his neck stood out, his mouth stretched in a terrible grimace.

“Charles, I think we should call a doctor!”

“No … Medicine … in jacket pocket … flask.…”

She rushed to the closet where his jacket hung, and found a silver flask in his left-hand pocket. She quickly opened it, returned to him, and held it to his lips. He took a few sips, then lay back against the pillows. His eyes closed, she saw his face relax, and his mouth softened into a smile. “That's it,” he whispered. “That's it.…” There was a faint medicinal odor in the air that Essie had noticed at hospitals.

“What
is
it, Charles?” she asked.

“Something I take for nerves,” he said. “That's all.”

“You never told me you suffered from nerves.”

“Close the curtains, Essie.”

Mystified, she did as he asked—went to the windows and drew the curtains. Then she returned to his bedside. His eyes were open now, and he was smiling, and in the semidarkness his color seemed to be returning to normal.

“Ah, I feel so good now,” he said softly. “So good.”

“Please tell me what's the matter.” She picked up the open flask and sniffed it. The smell, rather like ether, was very strong, and she felt suddenly dizzy.

“No—don't sniff,” he said in the same dreamy voice, and reached for the flask. “Here, put the lid back on.” She handed him the cap, and watched as he screwed it on.

“Charles,” she said, “please tell me what this is.”

“Phenanthrene sulfate,” he said, “for nerves.”

“But why do you need it?”

“Ah, Essie,” he said in that same sleepy voice. “Essie, Essie, Essie. I love you so. I love you more than all the world. I need it because sometimes I'm frightened. Shall I tell you all my secrets? Yes, I think perhaps it's time.”

“Please do.”

“So many lies. I don't want to lie to you anymore. I didn't know that I'd end up loving you so—that's the only reason. Will you forgive me?”

“Of course,” she said. “But tell me.”

“Do you love me too?”

“Charles, you know that,” she said.

“Then you shall know the truth,” he said, settling his head back against the pillows and staring up, still smiling, at the ceiling, “and the truth shall make you free—make
us
free. You see, when I met you on the train, I had no way of knowing we'd end up in love.”

“Just tell me,” she said.

“To begin with, my parents. Haven't you noticed I never mention them, that they didn't come to my wedding when I married Cecilia? They're not suburban Boston. I grew up on a farm in the western part of Connecticut, near Torrington. My parents were ignorant farm people, but I always had big ideas. At seventeen, I ran away from home.…”

“But—Harvard.”

“I never went to Harvard, though of course I'd've liked to. Never went to the Wharton Business School. I went to Detroit, first, and worked on the assembly line at the Ford plant in Dearborn. That's where I learned something about mass production—but I wasn't satisfied there. So I went to New York, and worked for a while at Macy's, as a stock boy. That wasn't getting me anywhere either, but at least I could buy decent clothes at a discount and think my big ideas and have my big dreams, and that's where I learned a bit about retailing and merchandising. Then a friend said to me, ‘You'll never get anywhere in New York without a college education. You've got to have a college education to be a success in New York.' And then he told me about Chicago, that it was a young city getting bigger every day. That's where the future is, he said, and in Chicago they don't ask questions. In Chicago, nobody gives a damn about your past or where you went to school or your family connections. In Chicago, they'll believe whatever you decide to tell them. And so I scraped together all the money I'd been able to save, put on my best suit, and bought a ticket on a train going to Chicago. And met you.”

“And the calling card … the address on Lake Shore Drive …”

“Ah,” he said, “you remember the calling card. That was a little luxury in which I indulged myself. But the only things that were correct on that card were my name and the telephone number I gave you—the rooming house where I'd arranged to stay.”

In the darkened bedroom, sitting on the bed beside him, Essie said nothing, thinking: Why have my own children been afraid to tell the truth to me?

“And you brought me to Jake Auerbach.” He laughed. “At first, with the story I'd decided to tell, I didn't know whether I could pull it off. But now, fourteen, fifteen years later, I guess you could say I've pulled it off.”

“Yes,” she said.

“Do you forgive me?”

“Of course,” she said quickly. “I understand ambition.”

“But it's been a nervy ride, ever since that train,” he said, hunching himself up on his elbows on the pillows and looking straight at her. “A few years ago, a friend, a druggist, said, “Try this—it'll relax you. It'll take the tension away.' It did. It does. Phenanthrene sulfate. But the only trouble is—”

“Yes. What is it?”

He laughed again, uneasily. “I try not to take it unless I—but the trouble is sometimes I need to, and the longer this damn Prohibition lasts—well, it's becoming harder and harder to get.” His smile faded, and he was staring at her intently, worriedly. “Am I an addict, Essie?” he asked her. “Am I?”

And so, in the weeks and months that followed, whenever one of the seizures of craving came, with the cold sweats and the violent trembling, she would circle his body with her arms, clutching him tightly against her, whispering over and over to him, “Make one more minute last until two. Make two more minutes last till five. Make five minutes last fifteen. Let fifteen minutes last an hour. Let an hour last a day … a day a year.…”

Until he would finally cry out, “Now!
Please!
” And she would fetch the silver flask for him.

“Now what's that damned brother of yours trying to pull?” Jake had shouted at her. It was the winter of 1927 and 1928, and Arthur Litton had reappeared in Chicago.

Essie, seated on a sofa in the large solarium, said, “I have no idea.”

“He's claiming that he and I signed a private buy-back agreement, allowing him to buy back into the company when profits reached a certain figure.”

“Well, did you?”

“Certainly not.”

“Then you've nothing to be upset about.”

“Damnit, it was Daisy's job to keep him as far away from me as possible.”

Though she did not smile, it amused her to hear that this was his description of “Daisy's job.” “Daisy's in Ohio, visiting her parents,” she said.

“I know where Daisy is!” he said. “But the minute she turns her back, your brother shows up like a bad penny. He's a crook and a liar, and he's not getting anything from me.” He turned on his heel and stalked out of the room.

“Why was Papa yelling at you?” she heard Mogie's small voice ask. She had not seen him curled in a chair in the corner of the room with a coloring book.

“It's just grown-up business,” she said. “Don't let it worry you.”

“Do you have a brother, Mama?”

“I told you it was grown-up talk, and sometimes when grown-ups talk they say things they don't mean. Besides, it's not nice to eavesdrop, is it?”

“This document is an obvious forgery,” Charles said, handing it back to him. “If I were you, Jake, I'd have no further communication with him whatsoever. We'll turn the whole matter over to our lawyers, and let them deal with it. He'll discover that extortion is a very serious charge.”

But of course Abe Litsky—or Arthur Litton, however one prefers to think of him—had other strings to his bow, other arrows in his quiver.

“Please see me, Essie,” he said to her on the telephone. “For old times' sake. After all, you're my only sister.”

“Jake doesn't want me to.”

“Do you do
everything
that Jake tells you?”

“No, as a matter of fact, I don't.”

“Then see me, Essie. There's so much we need to talk about. It's been ten years. I'm your family, Essie. Even if there've been differences, a family has got to stick together somehow.”

“Well—”.

“Let me come by. Besides, I have some news of Mama.”

“Jake mustn't know.”

“He won't find out from me, Essie—you know that.”

“You mustn't come here. I'll meet you tomorrow at the Palmer House. Two o'clock. We have an apartment there. Meet me there. It's apartment seven-B.”

“It's a date,” he said. “Thank you, Essie. Thank you,
bubeleh.
”

Twenty-four

“This is my last-ditch effort to get you to say you'll come to the dedication of the building, Mother,” Josh is saying to her. It is June, and they are sitting at one of the umbrella tables on Essie's wide terrace overlooking the city. Nearby, the men from Woodruff and Jones are pruning the boxwood hedges and setting out geraniums and petunias and marigolds in window boxes. In one corner, the big old flowering plum tree in its concrete planter spreads its branches like a tent set up for weddings, and Essie is thinking how becoming the early summer sunlight is to Josh's full, handsome head of graying hair, which has just the right amount of curl to it.

“Hm?” she says.

“Now, Mother. You heard me. You know perfectly well what I came here to talk about.”

“Oh, yes. The building. Well, that's still a long way off, isn't it?”

“Yes, but we need to know now, Mother. Programs have to be printed. Invitations have to be sent out. A lot of important people are involved in this. There's a chance that the Vice-President will be coming.”

“The Vice-President of the United States?”

“Yes.”

“You know, I can't remember who the Vice-President of the United States is,” she says. “Edith Wilson said a kind thing to me once. Of course your father was just trying to get war contracts, and did get them, but President Wilson didn't know that.”

“Mother, please try to stick to the subject.”

“Anyway, if you have all these important people coming, why do you need me?”

“Well, you're—you're a kind of a symbol, Mother. Of the company.”

“I was afraid you'd say that. I don't like being a symbol. What am I besides being the oldest living person who remembers Jake Auerbach?”

“A sense of continuity—”

“Bah. Humbug.
You're
the continuity, if you ask me.”

“All the generations of the family together. Four of them.”

“Our last get-together was a lulu. Remember that?”

“Is that what's bothering you? That was months ago.”

“There'd be another fight, I know it. I'm too old to fight.”

“We can hardly have a fight sitting on a stage in front of half of Chicago, Mother. With television cameras, and—”

“Those too? Oh, no, no. I don't want to, Josh.”

“Please, Mother.”

“You'll want me to make a speech, won't you.”

“Not a speech. Just a few words. A greeting. Something remembering Dad.”

“Is the building to be a memorial to him?”

“In some ways, yes. The employees tend to think of it that way. His bust will be in the lobby, as the founder.”

Essie laughs. “But he
wasn't
the founder! There was your uncle Abe. And everybody seems to have forgotten about poor old Mr. Eaton and Mr. Cromwell.”

“But he's thought of that way.”

“If you ask me, none of this makes any sense. A memorial. I detest memorials. Have I told you that I don't want a funeral? And no memorial services, either. I just want to be planted in the ground, as quietly and quickly as possible. Of course all that's in my will.”

“There are other reasons why I want you to be there, Mother.”

“Why? What are they?”

“Call them public-relations reasons if you like.”

“Explain them to me, please.”

“Well, you know—over the years there have been stories, rumors that you and he didn't get along. That you and he led almost completely separate lives.”

“True enough. Almost completely toward the end.”

“But if you were there, on the stage, to say a few kind words about him—”

“And tell a few lies?”

“And there are stories, too, that for all his philanthropies, he was something of a monster and a despot—”

“Which he was. Money did that to him. Money does that to some people. To weak people. I know. I saw it happen.”

“But he also had his kind and tender side.”

“Ha. So, they say, did Adolf Hitler.”

“That's a cheap shot, Mother. Surely you loved him when you first married him.”

“Oh, yes. That's the trouble.” Her eyes suddenly well up, and the moisture dims her vision. “Don't you understand? I married a totally different man. And then he changed, and he changed because I helped him.”

“Then do it for the man you married. After all, Mother, he's dead now. There's nothing he can do to hurt you now. Can't you forgive the dead? I've always been of the opinion that while it may be hard to forgive the living, the dead should be forgiven. Doesn't the Talmud say that?”

“Who knows? I've forgotten what I ever knew about what the Talmud says. You should have asked my father that. He had some interesting theories on forgiveness. So. You want a memorial. A memorial to my dead love. Will it be bronze?”