The House of the Prophet Page 5

  “It’s lucky for young dreamers like you that so many of our generous men of wealth have put their money into universities,” he observed with a grunt. “You can look at pictures of naked women and write books about them amid green lawns and shady trees.” His abrupt, sweeping gesture took in the Old Campus.

  “Is that all you think I’m going to do, Uncle Jacob? What about pictures of naked men?”

  “Don’t be unnatural, Felix! No Leitner was ever a pervert.”

  Heyward and I, for my friend Heyward Satterlee had accompanied us on our tour, laughed in delight. “You speak of these men of wealth as generous, Uncle Jacob. Isn’t it possible that they are simply expiating their guilt?”

  “Guilt? For what?”

  “For being what Teddy Roosevelt called malefactors of great wealth.”

  “That demagogue! I’m surprised you have the gall to quote him to me.”

  “But isn’t it true of many men we know? Isn’t it even true of us? Or at least, wasn’t it, before Father got rid of his slums?”

  “What do you mean by his slums? I wasn’t aware he had any slums.” But Uncle Jacob’s conscience, exiguous though it may have been, was strong enough to cause him to pause here. “I suppose you mean those properties down on Hester Street.”

  “And on John Street. And on Lambert Road. It’s all very well that we’ve sold them, but the guilt of having once owned them can’t be washed away by a profitable sale!”

  “I was not aware there had been a profitable sale,” Uncle Jacob said drily.

  “Well, a sale, then.”

  “I wasn’t aware there had been a sale.”

  I tried to think afterward if Father had ever actually stated to me that he had disposed of these tenements and decided that he had not. But he had most certainly given me the impression that he had altered the essential character of his investments. It was bad enough to be the dependent son of a man who had made his fortune in this fashion. It was out of the question to remain the dependent son of a man who was still willfully so engaged!

  I came home that weekend and confronted Father coldly at Saturday lunch with my discovery. He did not seem much perturbed.

  “I had contracted to sell them, but the deal fell through. Now there’s no market.”

  “I am afraid that I cannot accept any further money that comes from those wretched tenants!”

  Father’s dark complexion began to show a slowly deepening pink. “Do you want an accounting?” he asked in a harsher tone. “Shall I have Jack Fineberg prepare an allocation of my income between slums and other businesses? So that my morally fastidious son may have only pure dollars?”

  “What are you two talking about?” Mother interposed. “Surely money is just money. Can one dollar be cleaner than another?”

  “There speaks a woman,” said Father with heavy irony. “They have no moral sense, do they, Felix? They don’t understand the contamination of the source. Well, I guess I shall have to take a good look at my assets and reserve the wickedest pennies for my own poor needs. But what will your conscience accept? What about the dividends of Atlantic Steel? The company owns some buildings in Pittsburgh that make Hester Street look like the Waldorf. And how about the lease on the Armstrong warehouse? Two of the floors are rented by Georgia Phosphates. I am told the conditions in their mines are appalling.”

  “I guess I’d better renounce it all!” I exclaimed, flushing.

  “That is at least logical. May I ask how you expect to complete your course at Yale? Not to speak of the degree you may need as an art historian?”

  “I’ll use what you’ve already given me to finish up. And then I’ll go to work to earn the money to pay you back. Every penny!”

  Suddenly I had gone much further than I had planned. Suddenly there was something like hate in my heart. Why? This man had never really hurt me. He had failed to love me, but then he had never loved anyone. He was coarse and selfish, but no more so than half his world. I’m afraid that what I abominated was the idea that I could ever be like him, ever be part of him. I brushed him off me as if he had become an encasing mist.

  Father suddenly seemed weary and deflated.

  “Like all idealists you love the multitude, Felix,” he said sadly. “But I fear you don’t care much for the individual.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “You don’t care for me, that’s for sure.”

  “Morris, how can you say such a foolish thing?”

  “Is it not caring for you, Father, not to care for your money?”

  “Yes! Because in despising it, you despise me!”

  “I have the answer, Morris. If Felix won’t take money from you, let him take it from me. Perhaps then it will have been sufficiently laundered.”

  Father’s laugh was loud and unpleasant, but he did not even turn to Mother. He gave me a long, hard stare.

  “Do you really mean what you say about the money, Felix? Think carefully before you answer.”

  “I mean every word of it. I shall not take another penny from you unless you assure me that you will clean up those slums. A sale will no longer be enough. No, no, they must be renovated!”

  How prim, how smug I must have sounded! What is more irritating to older people than the high moral stands of the inexperienced young? I did not know that Father was already fatally ill with cancer of the lymphatic system. He had told nobody, and the symptoms were not yet detectable to the lay observer. It was he, not Mother, who needed my imaginary protection. The bitterness of my repudiation, on top of both my decision to go into art and his doctor’s grim verdict, must have been black indeed.

  “You may have brains,” Father said more heavily now, “but I wonder if brains will get you far without judgment. And without a heart.”

  I was about to protest my continuing affection, but he cut me short with a rough gesture, and then he left the table. I returned to New Haven that afternoon. This was most unfortunate, for I never saw him again.

  Three weeks later, without even telling Mother, he entered the hospital for surgery. He had been told there was some chance of success, but when the doctor cut into him he found the cancer too widely spread to be removed. Fortunately for Father, his heart gave out before he recovered from the anesthetic, and the first Mother and I heard of his illness was his death. It was like him never to bother anybody else with his troubles.

  He had made a will dividing his property between me and Mother, but before entering the hospital he had added a codicil leaving everything to her. I felt that this was kind of him, for it helped to assuage my remorse. His real estate was in much worse condition than anyone, even Uncle Jacob, had guessed. It would have been difficult for him to renovate his tenements: rents were down, and he was heavily mortgaged. It was my satisfaction in the years that followed, despite the vigorous opposition from Uncle Jacob, to insist on maintaining Mother’s scale of living as it had always been, even though this could be effected only by a steady erosion of her capital. After Uncle Jacob’s death, only five years after Father’s, I met no further resistance. Mother never inquired about money; she left everything in my hands.

  I have said before that Mother had golden luck. She maintained this good fortune as long as she lived. During the Great Depression, when she was nearing the end of both her life and her capital, I was beginning to fear that the latter would expire before the former, leaving Mother on my financial hands, which I should have minded only because it might have humiliated her. I needn’t have been concerned. Almost as the last assets were sold she died. There was nothing left of Father’s fortune to embarrass me.

  I did one other thing to prove to myself and to Father’s shade that I bore him no immature resentment. When I made my decision to go to Harvard Law School I accepted the money for my tuition from Mother and refrained from asking myself too many searching questions about the fetid origin of my supporting cash. It was in this rather curious fashion that I saw fit to apologize to Father for my presumption and impertinenc
e. It was not that I condoned his exploitation of slum areas. It was simply that I now realized that if I were to advance the moral standard of the Leitners in my own generation, it would be by my life and not by stagy gestures.

  Letter to Roger Cutter from Heyward Satterlee, March 3, 1974

  SIR:

  You will have already observed, from the thickness of my envelope, that I have decided to comply—at least in part—with your request. Had I seen fit to decline—even had I given all of my excellent reasons for doing so—it would hardly have taken so many pages.

  When I got your letter I was at first angry, then bitter, and finally resigned. How did you, who had been a witness, perhaps even an agent, of my humiliation in that summer of 1938, have the nerve to ask me to supply a chapter in the life of the man who had done me so cruel a wrong? But then I thought: no, if Felix Leitner merits a biography—and obviously he does—who is better qualified to write it than Roger Cutter? And if that be the case, is Cutter not bound to seek his facts wherever they are to be found? After this reflection came the bitterness. For have I any distinction in life greater than that of having been Felix’s friend—except perhaps that of having ceased to be so? Is it not perhaps fitting that I should myself supply the sad little footnote that my sad long life has been? And so finally came the resignation. What difference does it all make now? Felix and I are old men. Wasn’t it Talleyrand who said, “After eighty, there are no enemies, only survivors”?

  You see, I can quote Talleyrand. I’m not quite the boob you Felix-worshipers think. That was Talleyrand’s answer to the question of how he felt about Lafayette. I don’t say I’m Lafayette or that Felix is Talleyrand, but certainly if you had to choose which most closely corresponded to which, that is the way it would come out. I suppose what I’m trying to show you—however disingenuously—is that where I was naive, Felix was crafty.

  “What did Felix ever see in him?” That is what Felix’s other friends always asked. Because I was a stockbroker, I had to be a philistine. You all forgot that at Yale I was an editor of the Lit before Felix was. And that he gave me credit in the foreword to his book on the crash of 1929 for my part in the chapter entitled “The Last Summer.” And that we used to read Trollope together. All of Trollope. We would discuss the characters of the parliamentary novels on our fishing trips. It was a kind of shared hobby.

  But I had better get to the point. I have said that I would comply in part with your request, and so I shall. I am going to describe for you the early days of my friendship with Felix. I am going to try to give you some sense of what he meant to me. But I have no intention of getting into the subject of how it all broke up. I do not believe, even now, that I am capable of the necessary objectivity. And anyway, you should know that chapter pretty well yourself. You were there, God knows. And if you played a role in it, may God forgive you. I couldn’t. Even now.

  I guess I’ve made it perfectly clear, Cutter, that what I am writing is for history’s sake, not yours.

  ***

  Felix and I first met at the Driscoll School on Central Park West, which I attended in my seventeenth and eighteenth years. I suppose I should first explain what I—a Satterlee, a grandson of Bishop Potter, and the only son of Augustus Satterlee, senior partner of the old downtown law firm of Story, Satterlee & Strong—was doing at a school on the wrong side of Central Park, a good half of whose students were Jewish boys.

  It was certainly with only the most reluctant consent of my “distinguished” father. Let me take a paragraph to describe him. His like does not exist today, although an odd parody of it occasionally appears in novels about “society” with characters called Wasps. Our chroniclers of fashion are apt to be a generation behind the times, or else they try to give the public what the public likes to think is truth. I noticed only last Monday, for example, on my weekly visit to my old office, that my partners had loaned one of our floors to a movie company that needed a set laid in a brokerage house. Some of our customers’ men had volunteered to act as extras, but their services were politely declined. Why? Because they did not look like customers’ men! Where were their white shirts and black knitted ties? Where were their gray flannel suits?

  But to get back to Father. He looked like his portrait by Ellen Emmet Rand—grave, droopy-eyed, with a cream-colored vest, his gnarled fingers holding an open law reporter—provided the observer added the wrinkles, both on his face and in his clothes. For there were wrinkles there, just as there were prejudices in the mellifluous stream of his discourse and in the odd blind spots of his generally kindly vision. Father, by all accounts, was a fine lawyer and a powerful opponent in court; he was a strong trustee on charitable boards and had been a fearless opponent of city corruption during his term as president of the City Bar Association. He was also a devoted husband and father. But his rigid standards for inclusion in the narrow society in which he and Mother moved barred most of the New York world: Catholics, Jews, divorced persons, politicians, actors, retail business men... the list was endless. He also excluded financiers of doubtful integrity, even though he represented many such, and the too newly rich, unless they were plain and simple, something he called “nature’s gentlemen.”

  Father never mixed business and pleasure, rarely asked a client to the house and never quite trusted a man who had earned all or none of his own money. But strangest of all was his sublime confidence that the world basically shared his values. When he returned to his habit of Newport summers, after a brief experiment with the Maine coast, he observed to me loftily: “Have you noticed how pleased the tradespeople are to have the Satterlees back?” I hadn’t.

  I have said enough to indicate that the selection of the Driscoll School did not come from him. You have undoubtedly deduced that our family must have contained a will even stronger than his. Mother was a shrewd, plain, vital, intense little woman who bustled about her house and the city, in sober black or brown, an irresistible force at home and in her church work. She rarely raised her voice or lost her temper, but she never released her grip once she had taken hold of something. She liked to quote the comic motto of her family: “God made the clay, but we are the Potters.” She shared all of Father’s prejudices, but she did not hesitate to make exceptions whenever it was convenient to do so. This fact alone made her the stronger of the two.

  Being an only son of such a couple was not easy, and two younger sisters, pampered at least by Father, did not help. I realize now that Father loved me, but he rarely showed it, and I labored under a constant sense of disappointing him. I was always a poor student and never a leader, and my aptitude in athletics did not compensate in those days for other lacks, as it might have later. Father’s total disinterest in sports, not uncommon to New York gentlemen of his generation, deprived me of my one chance to make good in his eyes. At Saint Paul’s in New Hampshire, where I was sent at the age of fifteen, I did so badly in my classes that there was a question of dropping me to a lower form. Mother and Father came up from New York and successfully dissuaded the headmaster from this. They tried to be kind, but they were obviously both so concerned that I now became obsessed with marks in a desperate effort to justify their assurance to the headmaster that I could meet the standards of my contemporaries. This obsession destroyed the last remnants of my concentration; my grades dropped to the bottom; panic ensued. At the end of my second year, when I came home, Father announced to me gravely that I should not be going back.

  Mother had made a survey of all the private day schools in Manhattan and had concluded that Driscoll was the one most likely to get me into Harvard. It combined a reputation for coping with backward students with one for academic excellence, so I should not have the stigma of attending a rehabilitation center for dunces. Mother made short shrift of Father’s objections.

  “Jewish boys?” she retorted. “Of course there are Jewish boys, and from some of their greatest families, too. Trust them to pick the best school! I always say: if you want a bargain, go where the Jews go.”

&nb
sp; This conversation had an effect on me that Mother could never have anticipated. I was immensely relieved! For if I was being sent to a school that Father did not regard as fit for a gentleman’s son, it could hardly so much matter what grades I received there. From the moment I entered Driscoll I had the exhilarating sense of being on my own. All was delightful to my liberated spirit: the boys seemed pleasant, the masters sympathetic, the courses interesting. My tensions were eased; my marks at last satisfactory. In short, I bloomed.

  Felix Leitner, you will not be surprised to hear, stood number one in our class. We had adjoining desks in study hall, and he was very kind in advising a new student of the idiosyncrasies of the masters and the customs of the school. We soon became friends. I was never, of course, his intellectual equal, but that was not nearly so important among schoolboys as the fact that we both cared about soccer and girls. Felix, with his easy generosity, was willing to share his friends with me, and, thanks to him and to my new ease of mind, I felt more at home at Driscoll after two months than I had at Saint Paul’s after two years.

  Let me see if I can describe Felix as he looked then. He was considerably slighter than he later became. At first glance, and if one had not seen him sprinting down the soccer field, one might have inferred that he was delicate. Father thought he verged on the effeminate, but Father was biased. Mother considered him “beautiful,” and both my kid sisters developed crushes on him. His skin was pale; his brow high, clear, poetic; his hair thick, blond and curly, with a tinge of red. His nose was more Roman than Jewish; his lips were thin and seemed tightly sealed when closed. His chin was square and more determined than seemed to fit with the pallor and delicacy that were one’s general impression of him. But his eyes were his great asset. They were wide and of a pale gray-blue, flecked with green. Their expression was usually calm, quizzical, reflective, faintly amused. If there was a tendency to blandness, even lightness, in Felix’s features as a whole, except for the chin, the eyes redeemed it. They would question you, smile at you, half reassure you... and then they would congeal into something more elusive, perhaps harder, certainly further away. You could never quite “catch” Felix.