The Auerbach Will (44 page)

As a result, whenever they met, she could not wait to hear him tell her how he had spent his day, or week, and he could not wait to hear her latest news. When they met, they would talk furiously, eagerly, for twenty minutes or so. Then they would order a light lunch from Room Service, and talk some more. Then they made love. When they parted, there were never tears, and when they could not meet there were never recriminations. Though the years have blurred details, that is what Essie remembers most vividly—that bright framework that supported a tall structure of talk, laughter, passion and affection, solid as a city skyscraper.

Also, we must remember—Essie must remember—that those years helped her forget the loss of Prince. Not forget. But put it in the only perspective it could be put, which was in the perspective of the over and the past. Now, perhaps, is the moment to deal with that.

Picture a late-afternoon room, long shadows, curtains blowing in from a breeze off the lake. All this must be imaginary, of course, because Essie was not there. And fix the time at some point earlier than the beginning of her affair with Charles—make it 1923. Yes, somewhere in 1923 must have been when our imaginary scene occurred, because that was the year Prince was fifteen, and was given his first shares of Eaton & Cromwell stock and, as we shall see, there was a connection.

Imagine, then, Hans standing naked beside the bed, smiling slightly, and saying, “Princey, what do you figure your daddy would say if he knew about what you and I like to do?”

Prince pulls the bedclothes up across his knees, and says, “What do you mean?”

“I mean,” says Hans, “I think he'd be pretty fairly well upset by it, if he found out. About you and me. Don't you by it, if he found out. About you and me. Don't you figure?”

“Yeah, I guess so,” Prince says.

“I figure your daddy would be pretty fairly mad. If somehow he found out.” He reaches down for Prince's toe under the sheet and wiggles it and says, almost in a whine, “You know, old Hans here doesn't get paid much money for the job he does. Don't you think old Hans is worth a little extra? For the little extra things he does for Princey? For making sure that Princey's daddy doesn't find out what Princey likes to do with Hans? Your daddy's a rich man. The papers say he gives away millions of dollars to people he doesn't even know. Don't you think you could work out a way for old Hans to get a little more money?”

Prince says nothing.

Hans wiggles his toe again. “You're your daddy's fair-haired boy,” he says. “You can do it, I think, for old Hans.”

As has been said, who knows whether this little exchange took place as written? What difference does truth make about a thing like that? Does truth bring back anything?

What is certain is that in that summer of Prince's fifteenth year, 1923, there was a discussion between Prince and his parents on the subject of his finances, and Prince had asked that his allowance be increased.

“Your grades haven't been exactly spectacular at school,” his father said.

“I'm going to work real hard next year, Daddy, to bring them up.…”

In the end, Jake Auerbach had hit upon a better idea than increasing his son's allowance. He would sign over to Prince a certain number of shares of Eaton & Cromwell stock, enough to yield him an income for about four hundred dollars a month. Prince would open a bank account. This would give him a personal stake in the family business which he would one day head. It would teach him the value of money. It would teach him how American Capitalism worked.

Still, all might have been well if, in the following year, 1924, there had not been a ghastly scandal in Chicago. A fourteen-year-old boy named Bobby Franks had been abducted from his schoolyard and brutally murdered, his mutilated body found near a drainage ditch. Within hours, the two chief subjects were two youths not much older than Prince himself, Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb. The suspects and the victim were all members of prominent Chicago Jewish families. The Frankses, Loebs, and Leopolds had all been to parties at The Bluff. As more details emerged, the Bobby Franks kidnap-murder became even more lurid and spread to newspaper headlines across the country. Loeb and Leopold, it seemed, had had Nietzschean visions of being supermen, of committing the perfect crime. The two were homosexual lovers, and had killed Bobby Franks to achieve the ultimate homosexual thrill. The newspapers were filled with words like “pederasty,” which anyone who could read could look up in a dictionary and figure out what was meant.

These were very bad days at The Bluff—after the murder, and during the sensational trial that followed. Jacob Auerbach felt personally assaulted by the murder, and felt that it befouled the reputations of all Jews, particularly Jews such as himself who had worked to establish themselves as productive and responsible American citizens. The case was helping to fan, he felt—and with certain justification—the flames of anti-Semitism that were billowing across America in the 1920s. The case brought back ancient canards about Jewish ritual slaughtering of young children. Henry Ford, an outspoken anti-Semite, had caused to be published in his Dearborn newspaper the spurious
Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion
, which alleged to portray an international conspiracy of Jews to take over the world's money. In Germany, a young man named Adolf Hitler had founded his National Socialist German Workers' party and, the previous November, had staged his Beer Hall Putsch in Munich.

Jacob Auerbach could not seem to shake the case from his mind, and railed about it nightly from the head of his dinner table. “Filth … scum … perverts. A disgrace to their parents, a disgrace to their religion, a disgrace to America … vile creatures. The worst crime a son could ever commit against his father—against his God! Fairies … queers … they should be castrated in public, strung up by their heels. We can never have the Loebs or the Leopolds in this house again. No, perhaps we should write or try to call them, Essie, and tell them how we share their suffering over this terrible thing. What do you think? Which should we do? Their monsters of sons have made them the most miserable human beings on this earth. Should we hold them responsible for what their sons did?”

“Well, if you're talking about appearances—” Essie began.

“Appearances!” he shouted. “How can you mention appearances, after the way those perverts have made us all appear? They've made Jews appear to be fiends and madmen. Discipline—the right discipline—must have been lacking in their homes. There must have been some clue their parents were too blind to see. How can you have a son that's a monster and a queer besides and not notice something? There are ways of finding out about perverts—supervision … discipline … punishment. Miserable perverts must be stopped before they get to
this!
”

During this period, Hans, who was not unaware of these dinner-table fulminations, began upping his demands.

And so, late one October afternoon when the leaves had begun to turn and there was a chilly whiff of winter in the air, the older of Jacob Auerbach's two sons took out a pen and a piece of letter paper, sat at his desk and wrote:

Dear Mother and Daddy
—

I know that you have always wanted me to be a good son, and I have tried to be a good son, but I have failed, and that is why I am going to do what I am going to do
.

You see, Daddy, I am a pervert, too, like Nate Leopold and Dickie Loeb. I am a pervert, like them (and I even knew about them long before this happened), and Hans and I have been perverts together for about three years
.

I know you would not want to live with a son who is a pervert, and would not want to live with a monster. I don't want to live as one, either, which is why I am going to do what I am going to do. I'm sorry. I love you. So long
.

Prince

He folded the letter and placed it carefully on the center of his desk. Then he walked quietly down to Hans's room, where Hans lay sprawled on his bed asleep. Hans's service revolver, in its holster, lay slung across the back of a chair with Hans's clothes. Prince lifted the pistol from the holster, put it in his pocket, left the room and closed the door behind him, making no noise at all.

Then he went downstairs and into the garden, past the swimming pool, down the wooded pathways until the house was no longer visible. There he sat down on a jutting outcropping of rock. He took the gun out of his pocket, and studied it for a moment or two. He released the safety catch, as Hans had taught him to do. Then, as though there were nothing else in the world to do, he placed the barrel in his mouth and pulled the trigger.
I'm sorry, Daddy!
The Undersucker had come at last.

One of the gardeners, whose name was Giovanni, heard the shot, hurried to the place, and found him there. He went running to the house for help.

Jake read the note, and now the revolver was in his hand.

“Stop it, Jake!” she screamed. “Put that thing down!”

But he was already heading down the long corridor toward Hans's room.

Running after him, she cried, “Stop! Stop this!”

The door to Hans's room was flung open, and Hans sat there naked in his bed, rubbing his eyes. Jake pointed the gun at him.

Essie threw herself across her husband's back, wrestling his arm down, screaming, “Stop this!
Do you want to be a murderer too!
”

Finally, she felt her husband's arm relax, and she heard him say to Hans, “You came into this house with nothing but the clothes on your back. That's all you're leaving with.”

Then, for the next hour or so Jake Auerbach went on a rampage of fury and grief, or both, which Essie, numb, could only watch. He strode from room to room of the house, and wherever a picture of Prince stood on a table it was snatched up, hurled to the floor, smashed and trampled on. From photograph albums going back sixteen years, whole pages of family pictures which contained Prince's image were ripped from their bindings and hurled into the huge baronial fireplace in the library where, soon, a bonfire raged. Then it was up the stairs to Prince's room, where the contents of his desk were dumped on the floor, gathered up, and consigned to the flames. Next came the contents of his closets and dresser drawers—shirts, sweaters, suits, socks, underwear, even shoes and toilet articles and pieces of jewelry were flung into the fire. Into the fire went Prince's stamp collection, his books, his chess set, his collection of phonograph records, the model airplanes he had made of rice paper and balsa wood. “Oh, stop …” Essie moaned, when she saw the airplanes go up in flames. But he would not stop, and from the central chimney of The Bluff, oily black smoke, as though from some bizarre cremation, belched upward into the clear October sky. Within an hour, or so it seemed—for who, after all, was keeping track of time?—every trace and vestige of their son's life was burning or in ashes. Through it all, Jake kept roaring, “His name is never to be mentioned in this house again!” while the servants did the prudent thing, and kept their distance.

The death of young Jacob Auerbach, Jr. was listed in the papers as accidental.

Only later, when it was necessary to go over Prince's financial affairs with an officer at the bank, and all the checks that had been written to Hans came to light, did Essie wish that she had let her husband pull the trigger.

“Was there some clue, some signal that I should have got, but didn't?” she said to Charles when he came to pay a condolence visit. “Was there something I should have noticed—some warning—that I didn't see? For instance, he was always so … neat. Not just about his clothes and person, but about his room. Was that it? I mean, you know how messy most young boys are about their rooms. But with him, everything had to be in its place, just so. I can see him building those little model airplanes—all those little pieces laid out in order, just so, just as the instructions said. Picking up those tiny pieces with a tweezers, applying a little thread of glue. Everything perfect. And there was such a sensitivity about him. I'd be sketching out a design for an opera program—I can see him, standing over my shoulder, making a suggestion every now and then—‘Don't you think that would be better in a lighter blue?' So sensitive to little things like that. Or didn't I spend enough time with him later on? His stamp collection. He asked me once if I could paint the flags of the various countries at the head of each … section … of the album. I told him I was too busy then, I'd do it later. I forgot about it. I never did it. He never asked again, and I forgot about it—that's all! And he was so gentle. He loved his pony so. I'd hear him, in the stable brushing and currying his pony, talking to it. Not talking like he was talking to a horse, you know, but as though he was talking to a
person
. I can hear him talking to his pony. I can't remember what—or—or—or was he so unhappy in this family, in this house, that he couldn't bear it any longer, and was there some way I could have known this, or sensed this, and helped him somehow, and come to him and said—what? Where were the little signals that I missed, Charles? Or were they there—or what? Why didn't I see the danger that was living in my house, under my nose? Where was it, why was it—that I couldn't even see it? Where? Or were there signals that I didn't
want
to see, was afraid to see?”

Charles was studying, very hard, the changeless pattern of the square of carpet between his feet. At last he said, “There are no answers to any of these questions, Essie. You mustn't keep asking them of yourself.”

The

BOOK

of

REVELATIONS

Twenty-three

It is April, and Linda Schofield, Essie's great-granddaughter, is finishing her Winter Work Period for Bennington, and will soon be going back to Vermont. Linda is interested in a career in television broadcasting, and has spent the winter term working as a “gofer” for the
Today
show at NBC. (“I gofer coffee, I gofer sandwiches, I gofer the makeup man's cigarettes, but I learn a lot about what goes on.”) Today she has stopped by the apartment, on her way home, for tea. Sometimes, Linda calls Essie “Great-Grandma,” and sometimes it is “Gee-Gee.” Today it is Gee-Gee.