The Rich Are Different (13 page)

Already Jay was becoming a legend. My cousins regarded him simply as ‘the best fellow around’, my Uncle Lucius regaled me with tales of Jay’s brilliance and in the Da Costa home Jay was surrounded by doting sisters, a worshipping mother and a proud boastful father. By this time he was nineteen years old, handsome, self-assured, clever, perfect and insufferable.

‘I kept my promise to your father, Paul,’ he said as soon as we were alone, ‘and you needn’t be afraid I won’t keep it now he’s dead.’ But when he smiled that lazy arrogant smile I remembered so well, I saw the cruelty glow in his eyes and knew he planned to eke as much enjoyment as possible out of my fear that he would break his word. He played the game skilfully, making me sweat on countless occasions with his hidden allusions and
double-entendres
, but he never gave the game away. That would have destroyed his fun, and whenever he couldn’t be bothered to make me sweat with fear he would regard me with a mixture of absent-minded pity and crushing contempt. I felt deformed in his presence, unspeakably humiliated, and when I returned to New York from Newport I felt that all I ever wanted to do in life was to relieve this latter-day Jason of his intolerable golden fleece.

‘Revenge,’ said my mother sternly, ‘is not Christian, Paul.’ But she never suggested I should spend another summer with the Clydes, and the following year I went not to Newport, but to Cape Cod where my sister Charlotte had a summer retreat. It was there that I fell under the influence of my brother-in-law, an episcopalian clergyman. No doubt my lingering revulsion with my father’s morals coupled with my desire to escape from the harsh world which Jay’s behaviour represented to me, had made me ripe for a religious conversion, and when I was eighteen I told my mother that I wanted to enter the church.

‘How nice, dear,’ said my mother, magnificently suppressing her horror, ‘but if you’re to be a clergyman I insist that you be a well-educated one. I shall ask your Uncle Lucius if he will be generous enough to send you to England so that you can take a degree at Oxford.’ Of course she knew that once I saw Oxford I would immediately fall in love with the academic life she had always planned for me.

I arrived at Oxford with my idealism and my virginity intact, and within six months was deliriously in love with Dolly. We met by chance outside a sweet-shop where she was sobbing pathetically because she had lost the purse containing her week’s wages, and since I was a chivalrous young man I offered her a handkerchief for her tears, a cup of tea for her nerves and half a crown to cheer her up. My sole intent was to play the Good Samaritan, not the Wicked Seducer, but when she seemed perfectly willing to be seduced I found I had underestimated my susceptibility to pretty girls. I was nineteen at the time.

I was
twenty when she told me she was pregnant and my romantic idealism, despite my lapse from celibacy, was still in full bloom. It never occurred to me not to marry her. I knew as only a well-brought-up Victorian young man could know that if one did the right thing all one’s troubles would eventually be resolved, and besides I was so infatuated with Dolly that I was quite prepared to give up all for love.

Lucius Clyde cut off my allowance immediately and ordered me home. I had no choice but to go. My mother existed modestly on the small annuity which was all that remained to her after the payment of my father’s debts, and I had no money of my own.

When I arrived in New York with my pregnant wife my uncle summoned me not to his house but to his office downtown, and it was then that I first crossed the threshold of the mighty Renaissance-style building on the corner of Willow and Wall.

I saw the starry chandeliers and the high ceilings and the sumptuous furnishings of an exotic alien world, and I forgot the quiet quadrangles of Oxford and the cloistered peace of academic life. I looked down the great hall of the House of Clyde, Da Costa and I felt the power shoot through my veins. I was enslaved. I was Saul on the road to Damascus – or De Quincey on his first visit to the opium den. I walked into Lucius Clyde’s private chamber with every muscle taut with a sense of mission, because for the first time in my life I had absolutely no doubt what I wanted, and what I wanted was to be king of that palace at Willow and Wall.

‘You surprise me, young man,’ said my uncle sarcastically. ‘You always acted as if banking was far beneath you. However, you’re not the fool your father was, and if you’re willing to soil these patrician hands of yours with a little hard work I dare say we can make something of you. I’ll give you a position here – but on one condition. You must divorce your wife. Your marriage is a disaster. No man ever rose to prominence in an eminent Yankee banking house with a parlourmaid for a wife, and the sooner you get rid of her the better.’

The red rag had been waved to the bull and the bull at once reacted with predictable madness.

‘No man tells
me
to divorce my wife!’ I said proudly. ‘I’d give up the whole world rather than break the promise I made at my wedding!’

‘Then welcome to penury and good riddance!’ cried Lucius Clyde, and summoning his assistant he added with contempt: ‘Throw this boy out, will you? Asinine juvenile histrionics are always so damnably tedious.’

‘I’ll be back!’ I shouted at him. ‘And when I come back I’ll be sitting in your chair!’

I rushed from the room, ran the full length of the great hall, burst out into the street – and collided with Jason Da Costa. At twenty-four he had already been offered a junior partnership by my uncle, and his success was the talk of Wall Street.

‘Why, it’s the hero of the tennis court at Newport!’ he drawled. ‘I thought you were loafing around Europe with your nose in a Latin text-book – oh
no, I forgot! You married a parlourmaid! A bit rash, wasn’t it? But I suppose with your – shall we say background? – you never thought you’d be capable of fatherhood. May I offer you my congratulations?’

I lashed out at him. He laughed, sidestepping the blow, and ran lightly up the steps into the palace which would one day be his. I stared after him, and in the midst of all my rage and hatred my passing ambition took root within me and set me squarely on the bloody road to revenge.

[2]

I was penniless.

‘But you’re rich!’ said Dolly frightened. ‘All Americans are rich, aren’t they? You’ve got to be rich!’

That was when I knew that my money meant more to her than I did. I had given up all for love only to find that the love was an illusion. So much for my romantic idealism.

I could not get a job. My uncle Lucius was a vindictive man and he saw that not even a second-rank Yankee house would give me a position. My mother flatly refused to receive Dolly and I was too proud to ask her for a financial aid she could not afford to give me. At last I became sufficiently desperate to venture down the one remaining avenue in the world of banking, but I was convinced before I started that I would be wasting my time.

I went to the Jews. I went to the great Jewish House of Kuhn, Loeb, who refused me outright, I went to Seligman Brothers who were more polite but equally firm in their rejection, and finally I went to Reischman’s.

Although I was unaware of it, the patriarch of the house had a bone to pick with Lucius Clyde. Expecting to be summoned into the presence of some minor official I found instead to my astonishment that I was being ushered into the chamber of the senior partner himself.

‘Sit down, Mr Van Zale,’ said Jacob Reischman, seventy-three years old and a legend in his time.

He had been born in Hamburg and had come with his three brothers to America when still little more than a boy. They had begun their careers as pedlars, then moved into letters of credit and foreign exchange commissions. By the time I met him Jacob Reischman had one of the front-rank investment banking houses in New York, a mansion on Fifth Avenue and a complicated dynasty of sons, grandsons, nephews and great-nephews to carry on his illustrious name. His surviving brother was head of the largest merchant bank in Hamburg and his name was as famous in Europe as it was in America.

‘You seem a bright, willing young man,’ said old Mr Reischman sociably when we had talked for twenty minutes, ‘but there are a great many bright willing young men in my own family and in the families of my friends. First I must take care of my own, Mr Van Zale.’

‘Mr Reischman,’ I said, knowing my entire future depended on his employing me, ‘we may not both be Jews but we’re both New Yorkers, and
it’s as a New Yorker that I come to you to seek my fortune. When you got off the boat from Hamburg all those years ago, was there no New Yorker, Jewish or gentile, who was willing to give you the chance you deserved?’

I watched the faraway memories flicker at the back of his rheumy old eyes, and I was just thinking I could bear the agony of suspense no longer when his face softened as he smiled.

All he said was: ‘Lucius Clyde has been a fool.’

I went to work at Reischman’s as an office boy at a salary of five dollars a week, and was the only gentile in the entire establishment. It was popularly supposed that old Mr Reischman was sinking into his dotage. I was treated with politeness but with a certain intelligent curiosity, as if I were some strange animal acquired from the zoo and given the chance to become a household pet. The other office boys conducted interminable discussions in Yiddish in my presence, and from the way the word ‘goy’ appeared with frequency I knew I was the subject of speculation and possibly scorn. Finally, after befriending the senior grandson of the House, a highly educated, worldly young man of my own age, I asked him if he would talk to me in Yiddish whenever we met.

‘Good God!’ exclaimed Young Jacob, much offended. ‘I don’t speak that peasant patois! Who do you think I am? Some unwashed horror from the Lower East Side?’

I apologized hastily but that night when I returned to our two-room apartment in a Lower East Side tenement I called on the tailor who lived next door and asked him to teach me Yiddish.

I picked it up quickly. I have a certain facility in languages and I already had a working knowledge of German. One morning six weeks later when the office boys were discussing me as usual I turned around and told them in Yiddish exactly what I thought of them.

The news spread all over Reischman’s from the top of the house to the bottom in less than half an hour, and for the first time since I had been hired I was summoned to the senior partner’s chamber.

‘Chutzpah!’ said old Mr Reischman, who unlike his grandson had no embarrassment in recalling his humble family background. ‘I like that!’ And my salary was raised by twenty-five cents a week.

It was unfortunate that I was not as successful at home as I was at the office.

Dolly hated living in poverty among the immigrants of the Lower East Side as much as I did, and she was bitterly homesick for England, just as I was bitterly homesick for that other New York uptown. Naturally I could not take her anywhere, and even if we had lived in an acceptable neighbourhood we could not have afforded any social life. Pregnancy did not agree with her. I had to borrow money from my brother-in-law to pay the inevitable medical bills. I was cut off from my culture, cut off from my class, cut off from any comfort I had ever known.

The baby came. I had pawned my father’s watch to engage a better doctor, but he never arrived and an old Russian woman who claimed to be
a midwife was the only person I could find to help. When I could bear Dolly’s screams no longer I walked down to the bank and worked through the night. On my return at dawn I found the baby alive, Dolly looking on the point of death and the old woman whining for five dollars.

‘A lot of use you are!’ cried Dolly when she had recovered consciousness. ‘Running away like that, leaving me in this dump with that old witch – it’s a wonder I’m not in my grave! And what have I got to live for anyway? Two rooms in a nasty dirty foreign city and a spineless husband who can hardly make a ha’penny a week!’

‘One of these days—’

‘Oh, don’t give me that rubbish about getting rich,’ said Dolly and turned her face to the wall.

The baby was small, pale and noisy but much to my surprise Dolly decided to love it. I had thought she would never love anything which had caused her so much trouble, but evidently I had been assigned the role of trouble-maker while the baby had been exonerated from blame.

‘And you’re not going to choose some nasty American name for her!’ announced Dolly. ‘My baby’s going to have nothing but the best so I’m calling her Victoria after the Queen.’

I tried to summon some paternal feeling for the bundle in the shawl, but failed. The trouble was that I was quite unprepared for the baby’s survival; I had convinced myself it would meet the same fate as my two brothers who had died in infancy before I was born, and my plans for the future had been built around the assumption that once we were again childless I would somehow borrow the money to send Dolly back to England and arrange for a divorce. For some extraordinary reason she was still the only woman I wanted to sleep with, but by this time I had realized I was being daily humiliated by living with a woman who despised me.

However, the baby survived and by some miracle it was healthy. Every time I looked at it I would think how different my life would have been if it did not exist, but every time I looked at it I also knew that there was no longer an easy solution to my problems. I resented the baby’s presence in my life, I resented Dolly’s absorption in it, I resented the offensive odours which permeated our tiny apartment, the constant crying in the night, the disruption of all domestic peace and orderliness, but I was shackled by my guilt. I was responsible for that scrap of humanity, and I knew that if I sent it away on a ship to Europe I would be for ever haunted by pictures of Dolly dying young, my child put in some sordid orphanage and later drifting into inevitable prostitution, debasement and an early death in a workhouse.

There was only one road which offered any hope for the future so I took it. I worked myself to the bone at Reischman’s and when I finally achieved promotion I did not take my increase in salary home but invested it in the stock market.