The Auerbach Will (38 page)

“And don't ever tell him that I took you,” Daisy said.

And suddenly both were laughing so hard again that they had to lean into each other's arms for support. But it was also at that precise moment that Essie realized that Daisy Stevens was something other than a private secretary to her husband.

And how had this new knowledge affected her? It would be easy to say that she had reacted with dismay, with hurt and anger, with a feeling of bitterness and betrayal. With quiet resignation? But these were not her actual feelings at all. What should we say they were? It was more like a sense of relief and release. Years later, she would try to explain it to her son Joshua, who could never quite understand how his mother had been able to tolerate Daisy's presence in her life for so long. “Well, to begin with, she was fun to be with,” she had told him. “We laughed at the same things, including your father. He was not the easiest man in the world to live with, you know, nor was I the easiest woman. She—well, she
deflected
him from me in some ways. He could be terribly autocratic. And it was difficult for me, at times, to accept his pronouncements, to bow to his wishes the way he expected to be bowed to—to take his orders, or to cope, later on, with his fits of temper. But all this was easy for her to do, you see, because she had no commitment. She could walk out whenever she wished, and he knew it. I didn't want to divorce him because I
had
made a commitment, but until she came along I thought I might have to. I suppose a psychologist might say she ran emotional interference between him and me. It was like he and I had made a kind of sandwich of our lives, only I was dark Jewish rye and he was a slice of white bread, and she was the filling that held the two slices together. That's it. She was the glue in our marriage. She made it possible for me to be myself. She made the air of his house easier to breathe.”

“I'll never understand it,” Josh had said.

“Ah, dear lady, dear lady,” Joseph Duveen had said as he paced about among the twenty-odd canvases she had spread out for his inspection, and which she had brought home, rolled up in her luggage, from Europe. “I see I cannot trust you to be out on your own.”

“You don't approve of them?”

“Ah, I am making a joke,” he said. “No, you have bought beautiful things … beautiful things. It's just that I didn't think you were this adventuresome.”

“I particularly like this Braque, don't you?”

“Very fine. But how could I have misjudged your character so? I had planned for you—traditional things. Conventional things. Safe things. How could I have been so wrong? Now all these other things must go. Out! Out with them! Out with the Renaissance and Italian Old Masters! Out with the Barbizons! For what we can sell these other paintings for, we can buy hundreds of modernists. You must also have Gauguin, Van Gogh, Cézanne, Modigliani. We will turn your house into a temple for your Fauve painters. It is now September. Give me two months, and it will be done. Then, of course, you must—must put on an extraordinary entertainment, and introduce Chicago—which will have its breath absolutely taken away—to your collection of modern art.…”

“Well, I certainly have no intention of throwing everything out, Mr. Duveen,” Essie said firmly. “Nor do I intend to sell anything. I happen to be fond of
all
my paintings. But follow me, and I'll show you what I have in mind.” She led him into the carved-ceilinged room called the West Loggia, where the walls and the window hangings were of pale green watered silk. “I'm tired of all this heavy French furniture,” she said. “I'd like to get rid of it.”

Joseph Duveen looked sad, “Ah, dear lady,” he said. “The market is very poor for Louis Quatorze today, I'm afraid.”

“Then we can warehouse it.”

“Ah,” he said, “I know just the place! A little expensive, but your furniture will be given superior care.”

“My husband's company has plenty of warehouses, Mr. Duveen,” she reminded him. “And I'd like to do the whole room in white. The room faces the sunset, and my new pictures have nice sunset colors. I'd like to turn this room into a separate gallery for my Fauves.”

“Ah,” he said, closing his eyes in ecstasy at his vision. “All white—white silk. I know just the house, in Paris. And the window hangings—”

“Please check with my husband's domestic suppliers first, before dashing off to Paris.”

He made a face. “Of course, but nothing exists in this country comparable to what I have in mind. Ah, but it will be beautiful, dear lady—a whole gallery of modern painting! A wonderful room for a party!”

And that was how, really, the tradition of the annual Auerbach Christmas tree-trimming party began in Chicago, and later in New York, with the tall Norway spruce set up in the entrance foyer, and the tables set up in the gallery, and the stepladder, and the toasts. And it was the Christmas of 1919 that marked the emergence of Esther Auerbach as what the newspapers were soon calling “the noted Chicago hostess and art patron.”

At the meeting, in January, of the Chicago Opera Guild, the topic under discussion was the selling of advertising space in the opera programs, always a thorny matter. In time, Essie would learn that the penalty for speaking up, or offering a suggestion, at any meeting was inevitably to be made the chairman of a committee in charge of whatever the problem was. But in those days she had been more outspoken, and at this meeting she said, “I know I'm a relatively new member of the Guild, but I have a suggestion. I think our programs look a little dull—both in appearance and content. I used to design advertising for my husband's business, you know, and it seems to me that if the programs had colorful covers, had some interesting illustrations inside—maybe a few interesting articles on the operas, on what's planned for the next season, and so on—then people would take them home to read, and keep as souvenirs. The programs would have a longer ‘shelf life,' as they say in retailing. And that would make them more attractive to advertisers.”

“I think that is an
excellent
idea,” said Mrs. Bertie McCormick. “And I propose that we nominate Mrs. Auerbach as chairman of a committee to design and develop new programs. All in favor …”

And in that capacity Essie had served the Opera Guild for the next fifteen years, until the time came for her to be made President of the Guild.

“Tell me a story, Mother.”

“But not now, Prince. I have no time.”

“Tell me about the little girl who fell down the rabbit-hole.”

“Alice in Wonderland? Ask Fräulein Kroger to read it to you. It's good for her. It helps her English. I've got to go now. Your papa's waiting.” All that was years ago. The memories go every-which-way.

Your papa's waiting. That had been the excuse she had often used—used Jake as an excuse for not spending more time with their oldest son. Looking back, that had perhaps been at the heart of the trouble—without wishing to, she had turned her son against his father, made him afraid of Jake.

“Why is the boy crying?”

“I don't know, Jake.”

“It seems as though every time I enter the room he begins to whimper. He's too old for that.” He was eleven then.

“He scares me,” Prince would say softly.

“What about him scares you?”

“His voice scares me.…”

At twelve or thirteen, he had seemed too old to have stories read to him, but why was it up to Essie to decide that? Each child is different, each has its own needs. She had chastised Jake for not spending enough time with the boys, but she was just as guilty, too, dashing off to meetings of the Opera Guild, the Field Museum board, the Symphony, when she could have been reading stories to Prince. Too busy … your papa's waiting. But her own mother had been busy, far busier than she, and yet had always found time for her children, particularly in the evenings, when it surely counted most. “Our lives are different now,” she used to remind herself, but of course that was just another excuse, an excuse to neglect her children, to keep herself from their secret lives and longings. Secrets. Some of them, perhaps, they would have been willing to share with her, if only she had been more attentive at the time. Instead of leaving them with nurses, surrogates, bodyguards.

“Isn't Jake funny?” Daisy had said to her as they lay, side by side, on two of the cushioned chaises, shaded by umbrellas, beside the pool. It was an era when women set great store by the whiteness of their skin, when exposure to the sun was avoided, and when women still snapped open parasols to get them between shady places. Between Essie and Daisy, a glass-topped table held an ashtray crowded with Daisy's lipsticked cigarette butts, their empty iced-tea glasses perspiring on moist linen napkins, a pair of Daisy's gold earrings which she had removed because they pinched her ears, a glossy magazine splayed open, face down, the relics of a summer Sunday afternoon.

“Funny?” Essie said.

“Everything's not just a challenge to him,” she said in her indolent, smoky voice. “Everything's a threat. And he makes a metaphor of everything.”

“Metaphor?”

“Look at him. Listen to him.”

Jake and Prince were at the opposite, the shallow, end of the pool—Prince was nearly twelve—and Jake was saying to him, “Why don't you ever swim from here down to the deep end?”

“I don't like to swim to the deep end, Daddy.”

It was funny: the younger children all called their father Papa. Only Prince called him Daddy.

“You're a fine swimmer, Prince. But I've been watching you. You dive off from the deep end, swim to the shallow end, get out of the pool, walk back to the deep end, dive in again, and swim to the shallow end. You do it again and again. Why?”

“That's the way I
like
to swim, Daddy,” Prince said.

“It's perfectly safe to dive in from this end.”

“I know. But this is what I
like
to do.”

“It doesn't make sense, Princey.”

“I like to swim
from
the deep end. I don't like to swim
to
the deep end.”

“But what's the point of having a pool with a deep end and a shallow end if you won't dive in from either end?” his father asked with a kind of relentless logic.

“I don't know.”

“Perhaps I should have this whole pool filled in, since you don't seem to like the way it's built—with a deep end and a shallow end.”

“It's not that, Daddy.”

“Don't you like this pool?”

“Sure I do, Daddy.”

“Then why don't you use it the way it's meant to be used? Swim your lengths back and forth, back and forth, from one end to the other, the way other people do?”

“I don't know. It's just—”

“Let me put it to you this way, Prince,” his father said. “When you were little, and I was just starting out in business, working for Rosenthal's, I wasn't happy. And you know why? It was because I was swimming at the shallow end of the pool, where the little fish swim. But when I took the big step, and took over Eaton and Cromwell, I began swimming toward the deep end, toward the big fish. That was when life began to get exciting, to get challenging. I still have to deal with little fish now, but I also deal with big fish. And so that's why my business has been successful, I swim back and forth. The little fish are our customers. The big ones are our manufacturers. I swim back and forth, from the deep end to the shallow, and back again—back and forth. See what I mean, Prince?”

“See what
I
mean?” Daisy whispered in her husky voice.

But what Prince could not tell his father, what he did not dare to tell him
—
what he was ashamed to tell him
—
was that there was something at the deep end of the pool that he knew could not really be there, even though he had seen it
—
sometimes dimly, sometimes clearly
—
several times. If he dove from the deep end, he could swim quickly away from it with his eyes closed, out of its reach, and when it was time to open his eyes to look for the pool's opposite wall he was safely in the shallow water, out of danger. But if he swam toward the deep end, he would have to open his eyes, and there, in the dark blue depths, he would see the creature. It seemed to live below the grating of the main drain, though the hollow of the drain was too small to contain it, and it was able to spread out, reach out and upward from the bottom of the pool. Sometimes it was only a vague, dark, greenish-brown shape. At other times it seemed to gaze up at him with baleful, silver-mirror eyes. Sometimes it showed the black gash of a mouth with white teeth, and at times it showed the amorphous outlines of moving arms and legs, and a curling, snaky tail. At times, the arms and legs showed claws, and the tail showed spikes and scales. Sometimes the creature would bunch itself together like a ball, squirming just slightly. But at other times he had seen its waving appendages and tail uncoil and spread out and across the entire bottom of the pool's deep end. The creature had a name. It was called the Undersucker. If he didn't open his eyes, it didn't appear. But when he did, it did. The Undersucker wanted him to swim toward it, and waited until he opened his eyes
.

Prince knew that there were no such things as monsters, and that eleven years old, going on twelve, was too old to be afraid of creatures in the water of the swimming pool. But still he knew that the Undersucker was there, waiting for him, daring him to swim toward it with open eyes. And he also knew that if he told his father about the Undersucker, his father would think that he was crazy, or that he was going crazy. The boys at his school often talked about going crazy. Sometimes, wrapped in their towels from the showers, they would stagger about the corridors of the dorm before lights-out, eyes crossed, tongues lolling out of the sides of their mouths, grunting, making gagging noises, flailing their arms
—“
going crazy.” Going crazy was what happened if you played with yourself; that spurt that came at the end drained spinal fluid directly from your brain. Still, that did not prevent the older boys from showing the younger first-formers how to do it, how to make yourself go crazy. That was one of the things Prince thought about most that summer: that he was probably going crazy
.