The Auerbach Will (50 page)

“I'm glad.”

“I think we should never speak of this again.”

“Never. To anyone.”

“Never. Not to each other. Not to anyone.”

“Ever.”

The years go by, pulling their threads of memory behind them like the ripples from a hand drawn through clear water. Look, there is a deer drinking water from the lake, no it is two deer, a doe and her fawn, do you see them, darling? I love the lake in August, the smell of the pines. We should come here in winter, where we would have the lake quite to ourselves, and where the nights are so cold that the pockets of frozen sap in the pines explode with the sound of gunfire, at forty below, here in the Adirondacks. This house has no heat, but we could use log fires. For water, we could melt blocks of ice from the lake. Will we ever do it? Probably not. How far is it to Saratoga? Not far, twenty miles as the crow flies, we could go to the races there. No, I'm afraid I'd run into my brother; he plays the horses. I feel freer here. Why do we feel free? Because Jake is dead, and Cecilia is dead. Shall we see what they've packed for us for sandwiches? Are we getting old? I think this will be my last summer here, this place is just too big to keep up. Is that a bird calling? No, I think it is a tree frog, calling its mate. There—I hear it again.

She had named the baby Joshua, and as soon as he was old enough to understand she explained to him that he had his own book in the Bible, and she read to him from it: “As I was with Moses, so I will be with thee: I will not fail thee, nor forsake thee.… Be strong and of good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee whithersoever thou goest.… And it came to pass, when the people heard the sound of the trumpet, and the people shouted with a great shout, that the wall fell down flat, so that the people went up into the city.… His fame was noised throughout all the country.…”

In a curious way, with this child, she felt that she was returning to the traditions of her own father. Not to the relentless unforgiveness of his later years, but to the discipline and faith she remembered in him when she was a child, when he took her on his knee and read to her from the Book of Esther. These were the disciplines and traditions which it now seemed important to honor. Once she had been willing to cast them all aside, but now, with this child, they seemed to be coming back, and she found herself telling her new son all the stories her father had told her—about Josh's great-grandfather, the blacksmith, and the great-grandmother who had owned the horse, about the hard times for the Jews in the days of the czars. She even, from time to time, began to entertain the odd, surprising notion that it might be nice if Josh decided to become a rabbi. It was an irony.

And Jake, too, with this son, seemed to want to come back to her, and to his family. She would listen to him talking to Joshua, explaining the stars, naming the constellations, explaining the movements of the planets around the sun, the moon around the earth, the galaxy of which the Milky Way was the outer rim, the universe. Perhaps it was because he was getting older, and felt at last secure in his wealth and position, relaxed into what he had become, that he wanted to return to all of them and grow closer to this son than he had been to the other children. She would listen to him explain to Joshua what caused the tides in the ocean, and what made the lightning streak across the sky, and how this created the thunderclap that followed, and how, by counting the seconds between the flash and the thunder, you could roughly judge the number of miles between yourself and the center of the storm, and thus tell whether it was approaching or receding. “Perhaps you've heard that if an electric light bulb is not screwed tightly into its socket, or if an electric plug is not plugged into every outlet in the house, the electricity will leak out into the room, like lightning,” she heard him telling Josh. “This is not true.…” The words had a familiar ring. She had read or heard all this somewhere before, and then, with a little start, she remembered his lecture, years ago, in her school on Our Friend, Electricity.

“I'm going to Paris in June,” he had said to her. “Will you come with me?”

“Will Daisy be going too?”

“Not on this trip, no.”

The year was 1932, and Josh was four. What would later be known as the Great Depression was settling in, hard, and there were breadlines in the streets of cities. Essie knew that Eaton & Cromwell's stock had suffered along with others, and that the company had negotiated a number of very large loans from banks which were still unpaid, but the hard financial times had not seemed to affect Jake Auerbach's style of living. “We're lucky we deal in basic consumer goods,” he would say. “Even in the worst of times, people still need warm coats, they need shoes, underwear, soap—the basic things.” Also, earlier that spring, the Lindbergh baby had been kidnapped. A huge ransom had been demanded, and paid, but the child had not been returned and, two months later, its body would be found near the family's New Jersey estate. Among the Auerbachs and their friends who also had small children, there had been much worried talk, but between Jake and Essie there had been no mention of bodyguards.

“If I go, I think we should take Josh with us,” she had said.

“I agree,” he had said.

Then he had told her the purpose of the trip. He was to be presented with the French Legion d'Honneur.

“Will you wear your emeralds for the ceremony, Essie?”

“If you like.”

Extraordinary! This new attentiveness to her. It had begun to express itself in other ways as well. He would knock at her door, and ask to come in. He would sit on her bed and ask to make love to her. Love! Sometimes, while he stood looking lonely and almost disconsolate in her doorway, she would say to him, “No, Jake, no—please, I'm too tired tonight. Please, I'm sorry.” But there were other times when she could not force herself to be so cruel. Was this a part of her punishment? To have to accept unwanted love? Was this how justice was meted out? Was this her retribution? If so, she decided, she must accept it. “I love you,” he would sometimes whisper. But I don't love you, she would think. I haven't loved you for a long time. I can even put a date on it, I think. I think it was the day when Prince … went away … and you turned his life into a bonfire at The Bluff.

But I don't hate you, either. Who are you, Jacob Auerbach, Legion of Honor wearer, friend of electricity? The simple answer came: my husband. The man I asked to marry me. And somehow, just as she had managed to do it once, accidentally, inadvertently, she had managed to make this husband fall in love with her all over again. Extraordinary! So strange! It was another irony, another riddle. Was that what life was in the end—a conundrum? A question, or a puzzle, to which only a conjectural answer can be made?

Some specifics:

“You're going to be gone a long time,” Charles had said to her.

“Only six weeks,” she said.

“We can't turn the clock back, can we,” he said, and she had studied his face, wondering what he meant, because it was not like him to speak in clichés.

“Do you mean you have regrets?” she had asked him finally.

“No. But it's so funny. His new dependency on you. When did it start?”

“I think you know that answer.”

“But how do I feel about it? Am I jealous? Is that it? I have absolutely no right to be.”

“And I don't want you to be.”

“Or am I jealous because, as he grows more dependent on you, he depends less on me? Or is it because he can have you whenever he wants, but you and I have to meet in secret? All I can say is that, at times, my feelings are very complicated, Essie. Sometimes I think it's I who should be in Silver Hill, and not Cecilia.”

“Complicated,” she repeated. She smoothed his brow with the palm of her hand. “It's complicated for me, too,” she said. “Difficult. All
I
can say is that if it weren't for you it would be just—unbearable. No, that's too strong a word. Empty. Dust in the mouth.”

“For me also.” Then suddenly, “It's just that I can't bear the thought of him touching you!”

She lied to him. “
He doesn't touch me!
”

He turned his eyes away.

Jake had developed another curious interest—genealogy. He had begun constructing the Rosenthal family tree, writing to distant relatives in the Rhenish Palatinate, full of questions, gathering as much information as he could find about the Rosenthal antecedents. On that trip to Europe in the summer of 1932, they had also visited Germany, where Jake had uncovered long-lost cousins and where they visited cemeteries and copied inscriptions from headstones.

“Why don't you do the same for the Auerbachs?” she asked him.

“The Auerbachs were small potatoes,” he told her. “But the Rosenthals are a distinguished family. Mayer Rothschild the First was a second cousin of one of my great-grandfathers.”

Strange to think, of course, that many of those newfound cousins Jake Auerbach had discovered in the early 1930s would later perish in places like Auschwitz and Buchenwald. By the time it became clear that Hitler's attacks upon the Jews, which at first had been only verbal, amounted to more than a temporary political aberration—and Jake was offering to send money to help members of his family to escape—it was too late. But still the family tree grew, and it was all, Essie sensed, somehow for Josh's benefit.

“Where should we send him to boarding school?” he had asked her.

Again, astonishing! He had never consulted her about schools for the other children. “The boys have always gone to Lawrenceville,” she had said to him.

“But for Josh—we might think of something different.”

“Well, what if you and I were to take him around to various schools, and let him make up his own mind?” she said.

“Excellent idea. We'll tour him around.” And he added, “This summer. Together.”

“But Jake, he's only eight!”

“Can't get him registered too soon. Besides, he's bright for an eight-year-old.”

And so the three of them, in a series of chauffeur-driven cars, had toured Eastern boys' schools, and Josh had selected the George School in Pennsylvania, a school which, as it turned out, was operated by the Society of Friends. Josh had chosen it because he liked the big trees.

“I never felt that Lawrenceville really welcomed Jewish boys,” Essie said.

“Neither did I,” said Jake.

“Am I a Jew?” Josh had asked his father.

“Well, in a sense, I suppose yes,” Jake had replied. This would have been in the winter of 1940, when Josh was twelve, and home for the Christmas holidays after his first semester at the George School. There was some anti-Semitism there, it seemed, even among the Quakers and the Brotherly Love.

“Why don't people like us?”

“The fact is,” Jake said carefully, “that
some
Christians don't like
some
Jews. Some Christians feel that some Jewish people like ourselves, who are well-to-do, have too much money. They are envious. They don't appreciate what men like myself have done for the less fortunate. You're too young to remember it, Josh, but there was one day in late October of nineteen twenty-nine—it was called Black Thursday—when I had the experience of seeing my personal fortune reduced by exactly one hundred million dollars. Think of that. And do you know why that was? It was because when the stock market crashed I personally wired every Eaton and Cromwell branch manager to say that I would personally guarantee the brokerage account of any Eaton employee who was in trouble. That day cost me—personally—a hundred million dollars, but it was one of the happiest days of my life.”

Yes, Essie thought, smiling, remembering Black Thursday as she worked on a flight of needlepoint geese for a pillow-cover, it may well have been, but what Jake has neglected to mention was that the grand gesture made in October of 1929 was only performed after a large press conference had been called to announce it, along with the great philanthropist's belief in the future of America under Herbert Hoover.

“If that can't be called Christian philanthropy, then I don't know what it is,” Jake continued. “You see, there is really very little difference between the Christian and the Jewish religions. In some ways, they are identical. The Jewish religion, however, is much more ancient. Christ Himself was a Jew, and Christianity springs directly from ancient Jewish teachings and beliefs. That is why you must be proud to be a Jew. The only difference between Judaism and Christianity is that the Jews do not accept the divinity of Christ. To the Jews, Christ was not the Messiah. The Messiah is still to come, the Jews believe. So one way to think of Judaism is simply as a kind of Christianity without Christ.”

It was Lily Auerbach's definition of Judaism, of course, slightly altered.

“So simply ignore people who say they don't like the Jews, Josh. They're simply jealous of Jews like us who are well off, and they want to take away our money. So, incidentally, does Mr. Roosevelt—along with wanting to get America involved in Europe's war.”

Jake, she knew, was more than a little ambivalent about the prospect of America getting into the war. On the one hand, he took an isolationist stance, and supported people like Charles Lindbergh and the America First Committee. But on the other hand, he knew that Eaton & Cromwell had prospered enormously during the first war, and had every reason to believe that the company would do even better during another one.

Then, a year later, came Pearl Harbor, and America was in the war, and organizations like America First collapsed of their own weight. Secretly, of course, Essie was pleased that Josh was too young to enter the service and that, with luck, he would never have to fight. Mogie, at twenty-three, was just the right age and, to give him credit, he immediately tried to enlist—he had always been fascinated with soldiers and war games. But the chronic ulcers which had been troubling him since his early teens caused him to be rejected. Instead, he secured a position with the O.S.S. in Washington, where he refused to reveal what his actual duties were, though he implied that they were very secret and important.