The Wrong Kind of Money (31 page)

“And what do they need the Lieblings for? They need us for
booze.
Christians have a lot of guilt about booze, though Lord knows they knock back enough of the stuff. They don't like to admit that they need us to get them plastered at the country club. And so they blame us for drunk drivers, for the Bowery bums, and for all the winos on skid row. My husband had a theory. He used to say that Christians secretly believed that booze ought to be free, that it was part of their birthright, and that if drink and drugs were free there'd be no more crime, and poor people would stay home where they belonged and not go out causing trouble for the rest of us. Lord knows, at least once a week I get a call from some Christian charity asking if we'll give them free booze for some party. When I say no, they accuse us of being greedy. Then they ask if we'll give them liquor
at cost.
When I say no to that, they think it's because we don't want them to find out how little the real cost is, and how enormous our markup is. In this business, there's no way to win.

“A few years ago, our company ran an ad at Christmastime, urging drinkers not to overindulge in booze during the holiday season. That ad created a big stir, and we've repeated it every year since. The ad wasn't even my husband's idea, but he got all the credit for it, and for a while it even began to seem as though the Lieblings might be beginning to be accepted as respectable members of the New York business community. For a while. It didn't last. The stigma of the booze business was too great. There's just no way to overcome it, and my husband and I gave up trying.

“Meanwhile, there's a group of fine old German-Jewish families in this city. At least they
think
they're a group of fine old families. But the Lieblings will never be accepted by that crowd. My family, the Sachses, were a part of that. I'm sure Noah has told you about my father. He was Dr. Marcus Sachs, a famous educator—part of the service class, of course. He had his own school, the Sachs Collegiate Institute, and he turned out boys who were ready for Harvard by age fourteen. Discipline was his secret. That's Father's portrait over the mantel in the library. He was widely admired and respected, and he and Mama had dinner at the White House. But I lost all that status when I married Jules Liebling. Even my Sachs relatives look down their noses at me now, because I was forced to marry so far below my station in life.”

“Forced
to marry, Mrs. Liebling?”

“Chose to marry, then. Or, let's say that at the time I had no other choices. I'm sure you've heard it said that the Jews have always had to live in two communities. But with the Lieblings it is a little different. Outside, we have the Christian community. Then we have the Jewish community. Then we have just ourselves, this small family, isolated from both communities, not a part of either one. Just us. That's why I care so much about who marries into this family. As Lieblings, people come to us for money but nothing else. When Noah takes over the company, as he will someday, people will come to you for money, but for absolutely nothing else. You will probably find it a rather lonely feeling, being Mrs. Noah Liebling. But if you are going to stay married to Noah Liebling, you will have to get used to it. I am telling you all this because these are what I call the Liebling facts of life. I understand you are from a small town in New Hampshire, where you certainly cannot have experienced anything like what you will experience as Mrs. Noah Liebling. In a way I feel sorry for you. I hope you're up to it. There are other small problems that go with it. Noah's brother is a pansy. His sister tried to work in films, and then began marrying unsuitable men. No, being Mrs. Noah Liebling will be no bed of roses for you. It won't be easy. That's why I feel it's necessary to warn you of all the problems you will have to face. I hope you understand.”

“Yes,” Carol said, her eyes flashing. “But as Mrs. Noah Liebling, I intend to change all that!”

Hannah Liebling smiled at her for the first time. “Dream on,” she said. “But I must say I admire your spirit, my dear. Shall we have our coffee in the library? We can talk to Papa's portrait there.”

As they were leaving the dining room, Carol paused in front of one of the two Boule sideboards. “This is a lovely Ming Yellow jar,” she said, touching it. “Chinese Export porcelain is something of a hobby of mine.”

“My husband's ashes,” Hannah said.

But, remembering all this, Carol sometimes asks herself: Have I really kept my promise? Have I really succeeded in changing anything? Nearly twenty years later, Georgette Van Degan wants me to give a party with her. Is that the kind of change I was talking about? Will that change anything at all?

When she got home that night, Noah took her in his arms. “I suppose she gave you her standard Liebling Facts of Life lecture,” he said.

“Yes, but she smiled at me, and she called me ‘my dear.'”

“It doesn't matter. We have each other,” he said.

A few months later, they were celebrating Noah's thirty-first birthday, and were opening his birthday cards, which were mostly from other people in the company. There were a great many cards. The company, Carol had discovered, operated rather like a large college fraternity, with Hannah Liebling as its fond but firm house mother, a role similar to the one she had played when Noah's father was alive. There was a strong feeling of family in the company. People kept track of one another's birthdays and other special days, and a certain number of people in the company were actually Noah's relatives. Jules Liebling had had an older brother, Nathan, who had been severely crippled by polio as a child. Still, a position had been found for Nathan, and now Nathan's three sons all worked for Ingraham in various capacities. And there were other cousins, some of them so distant their relationship was barely traceable—young men who had arrived from the old country, looking for work in “Uncle” Jules's business—and jobs had been created for most of these people and, in time, for their sons and in-laws. Jules Liebling had been a benevolent despot. He rarely fired anybody, unless it was for some gross malfeasance, such as stealing. When it was felt that an employee had reached his fullest potential, he was not let go. He was just kept on in whatever capacity he had ended up in and was promoted no further. Thus the old gentleman who supervised Ingraham's mail room was some sort of Liebling “cousin.” For social life most Ingraham employees entertained one another. Thus, Frank and Beryl Stokes would become Noah and Carol's closest company friends. It was a comfortable, if somewhat closed and insular society, as Carol's mother-in-law had warned her. On formal occasions, such as at meetings with one of the company's worldwide network of advertising agencies, the company was usually referred to as “the house” or, even more formally, as “the House of Ingraham.” But among those who worked for Ingraham, the company was nearly always called—almost lovingly—“the mill.”

They sat in the living room of their first apartment, at 25 West Seventy-second Street, and Carol slit open the envelopes, read off the salutations on the cards, and then handed them to Noah, who identified the senders.

“George and Barbara,” Carol said.

“That would be George Billings. Shipping Department. Toronto.”

Then Carol opened a card and paused, reading the inscription a second time. “This one's signed, ‘All my love, Bathy.' Who is Bathy? And what a strange name!”

He quickly snatched the card from her and tore it up, tossing the pieces in a wastebasket. “Never mind,” he said.

“Darling—who is Bathy?”

“None of your business,” he snapped.

“Who is she? Some old girlfriend of yours, I suppose?”

“I said it's none of your business!”

“I thought we weren't going to have any secrets from each other,” she said.
If you stay married to him,
her mother-in-law had said. “I want to know who Bathy is, Noah.”

He still looked very angry. “Her name is Bathsheba Sachs,” he said at last. “She's my mother's younger sister.”

“You mean she's—your aunt?”

“She has no business writing to me.”

“Why on earth not? Your own aunt?”

“It's a long story,” he said. Then he told her about the trouble with Bathsheba Sachs.

10

Rumney Depot

Having grown up in the little town of Rumney Depot, New Hampshire, the only rich people Carol Liebling—who was Carol Dugan then—had known were her friends the C. R. McClarens, who lived in a big white colonial house on Cobble Hill Road. C. R. McClaren ran a prosperous dairy business, and owned a prize herd of Golden Guernsey cattle. The milk cartons on the Dugans' breakfast table always bore the label of McClaren Farms and featured a picture of one of Mr. McClaren's most famous cows which, reportedly, commanded a breeding fee of thirty thousand dollars. At the Laconia First National Bank, where Carol's mother worked, and where C. R. McClaren did his banking, Mr. McClaren always tipped his favorite teller fifty dollars at Christmastime. Unfortunately, Carol's mother was not that teller.

C. R. McClaren was even nationally famous, or almost, since he was president of the American Guernsey Cattle Association and, it was said, United States presidents occasionally asked his advice on agricultural matters.

Carol remembers one Halloween, when she was in the fifth or sixth grade, when the rumor circulated to the effect that the McClarens were handing out twenty-dollar bills to trick-or-treaters. She and three friends, in their costumes, trekked up to Cobble Hill, under the big porte cochere, and nervously rang the front doorbell. A maid appeared and asked them to go around to the back of the house, to the kitchen door. There the children were handed hot chocolate in paper cups. Through the kitchen they were able to glimpse Mr. and Mrs. McClaren at their dinner table.

Because of their prominence, the McClarens' doings were heavily chronicled in the weekly Laconia
News-Leader
and to Carol, growing up, these reports made heady reading. When Mr. and Mrs. McClaren left for Europe for the summer, the newspaper printed the story, and the McClarens' stately progress from one European capital to another was also dutifully reported. When they returned, there was always a headline,
WELCOME HOME
, C
YNTHIA AND
C. R. M
C
C
LAREN
! When the McClarens and other business leaders in the state were entertained at the governor's mansion in Concord, this news made the front page of the
News-Leader.

The McClarens had three daughters, Beth, Monique, and Stacy—all several years older than Carol. Of the three, Monique McClaren was Carol's favorite. It was something about her name, alliterative, with all those smart, clicking consonants. Her second favorite was Stacy, who, though she didn't have Monique's glamour, sounded peppy and lots of fun. Beth McClaren sounded a little dull. When, one by one, the McClaren girls went off to boarding school and college, or became engaged, or were married, these events were also reported, with weddings again making the front page, and Carol read about them avidly.

Carol Dugan had never actually met any of the McClaren girls, though she had occasionally seen them speeding by in their snappy little sports cars, and her mother had once waited on C. R. McClaren at the bank, when his regular teller was on vacation. Still, having read so much about them while she was growing up, in a little town where not much happened that wasn't McClaren-oriented, she began to feel she knew them well, that they were her special friends, the beautiful Monique, especially. This feeling was so strong that, years later in New York, meeting a man from Laconia at a party, Carol found herself asking him, “And how is Monique McClaren? Is she still married to Tim Tyler? Are they still living in Boston?” It was not that she was envious of the McClarens, exactly. It was just that their lives seemed so much more interesting than hers.

Her own Roman Catholic upbringing was strict and, as she looks back at it, also downright strange. Her mother, Anna Dugan, was proud of her position at the bank because tellers were required to be well mannered, well spoken, well dressed, and ladylike. Gum chewing was grounds for dismissal. Also, no teller was permitted to leave the bank at night until every penny in her cash drawer, from that day's transactions, had been accounted for. “My drawer has always balanced out,” her mother used to boast.

Carol's father, she was told, had simply disappeared. Her mother would tell her nothing more, and Carol has only a vague, blurry memory of a man in the house, who she supposes must have been this disappeared father, though she is not even sure whether this is a true memory or a dream. Once, on television, she had watched an old movie called
The Invisible Man
and this is still the way she imagines her father's disappearance—simply being made invisible through some mad scientist's alchemy, yet still able to make his presence felt through an ability to make objects move mysteriously about the house. A pair of pinking shears left on her dresser would reappear on the kitchen table. The Invisible Man had moved them.

At the all-girls' convent school that Carol attended, the nuns told their charges that if they touched themselves
there
all their fingers would fall off. Today, though she knows better, that thought still manages to frighten her. Carol once asked her mother where babies came from, and her mother replied, “From the river.” Sometimes, after school, Carol would wander along the banks of the Pemigewasset River, hoping to find a baby ready to be scooped out. Finding a baby would certainly relieve the boredom of her days. She also asked her mother if boys were any different from girls, and her mother told her, “All children are alike and identical in the eyes of God.”

Anna Dugan spoke of God often, and also of something she called the Eternal Verities. In the paintings she did in her spare time—watercolors of towns and landscapes recalled from memory, wistful renditions of Christ's suffering on the cross, or of the Blessed Virgin holding the Infant Jesus—she was always trying to express the Verities: Truth, glittering like a sword in the shadows; Virtue so unchallenged as to defy the lightest touch of humanity; Honor, like a flower bursting forth from the rubble of the world. Anna Dugan rarely spoke of her own past, though when she did she implied that her family origins were genteel. Looking back, it sometimes seems to Carol that her mother existed not only in another century but on another planet—a planet surrounded by angels. “I am sure the angels heard that,” she said every night as she and her daughter knelt by the sofa in the living room of the little house that Anna Dugan owned outright—“free and clear,” without a mortgage (mortgages, even though she worked for a bank, Anna considered an invention of the devil)—to say their prayers.