False Gods Read online

  Everything went my way in Hadley & Jerome. I was an associate for only six years before becoming a junior partner. At thirty-five I was a “name” partner and at forty the managing one. As an expert in corporate finance I made a fortune for myself on the market, quite aside from my large fees, and when Mr. Stonor died I was the executor and trustee under his will and director of his charitable foundation. It was widely observed on the Street that Maurice Leonard had a sufficient stranglehold on the Stonor estate without marrying Dorothy. But then I loved Dorothy. I knew people said that I loved where I wanted, but that is love too.

  Her marriage to Guy had lasted only three years. She had hoped to keep it patched up at least until her father, aged and ailing, should have died, but Guy had proved too much of a cad for that, and poor Mr. Stonor had the bitterness of surviving to see his best-laid plans in shreds. The only amelioration for him was the possibility that, in mitigation of his own former bad judgment, he might be able to propose his trusted and able favorite as a candidate for successor. Needless to say, I saw what Dorothy’s reaction would be to a second paternal champion, and I managed to contain the old man’s enthusiasm to suggesting me to his daughter as her divorce lawyer.

  She was not at first keen about having an attorney who could say “I told you so,” but as she had never gone to any firm but Hadley & Jerome, and as I was the only partner who knew all about her financial matters, she agreed at least to talk to me. And when she found me polite and reserved, yet at the same time tactfully sympathetic, she agreed to the retainer.

  It did not take me long to gain her confidence. Like many persons not accustomed to confidences, once the gates were opened for what she deemed a legitimate purpose, then everything tumbled out, almost to her relief. Her marriage had been a sad example of the old American conflict between greed and idealism. How much happier our tycoons and their offspring would have been under the European system of arranged marriages and deaf to the eternal chant of love, love, love! Now, in saying this I of course recognize that an arranged marriage was precisely what Mr. Stonor had sought for Dorothy, but he had reckoned without two considerations which wouldn’t have existed for a father in the Old World: one, his daughter’s stubborn insistence that hers was a love match, and two, Guy’s admittedly unanticipatable adherence to the tough Yankee notion that any “real” man should make his own money. Instead of following his natural bent of cool reason and concentrating on the great career in public life for which Dorothy, inspired by her father, had essentially married him, Guy had quixotically joined a new firm of adventurous investment bankers to engage in a series of disastrous speculations with money borrowed and even (I know, for I later covered it up) embezzled from his wife. His anger over his failures he turned against poor Dorothy, who at last found the courage to close her purse, and the prowess that had done so little for him on the market he turned to other boudoirs, giving her little alternative but to take my advice and divorce him in New York for adultery.

  Dorothy’s disillusionment had been a shattering experience. It was almost inevitable under the circumstances that she should have come to regard me, steadfast, trusted, favored by her father, and now her champion against the betrayer, as everything she should have been looking for in the first place in a husband. Did she also harbor the flattering suspicion that I might have remained a bachelor all those years because of unrequited love? We never discussed this, anyway, either then or afterwards, any more than we did my own suspicion that my Jewishness had become romantic to her, exemplifying as it did to her naturally unprejudiced mind ideals much finer than those of the arid and snobbish society to whose standards she had weakly (as she now saw it) submitted. To what more competent hands, to what more proven trustworthy person could she confide her disillusioned self, her little boy and the fortune she had never wanted?

  I moved so slowly and cautiously in the matter that no one noticed what was going on but the ever-watchful Horace. He was married himself now, to a plain, tart, nimble-minded little wren of a woman who was totally and protectively devoted to him and indignantly suspicious of anyone who failed in her eyes to give her husband the full due that he was too modest to expect. I think she dreaded the idea of Dorothy’s coming back into his life, even as the wife of a friend, and I suspect it was she who egged him on to face me in my office one morning with the grave question: “Are you in love with her, Maury? If you can assure me of that, I have nothing more to say.”

  I told him that I was, in a tone that he could hardly challenge. And it was true, because I wanted it to be true, and things I have wanted to come true, where I was importantly concerned, for the most part have. I liked and admired Dorothy; I appreciated her character and ideals; I found her person desirable and her conversation amusing. What more was needed for a happy marriage? There was no reason to apprehend the advent of a stronger attachment, for I had never felt a stronger one, and I knew myself pretty well. Nor did Dorothy have any reason to fear losing me for any change in her own circumstances; my loyalty would have been proof against any failure of health or fortune. What more could a woman ask than the confidence that the husband she had chosen could be shed only at her own volition?

  Edgar, her little son, was an effete, spoiled brat, but precocious and curiously realistic for his tender age. I think he may have expected me to cultivate his affection, in some clumsy, bearish, vulnerable, stepfatherish way, but I was too shrewd to give him the least opportunity to put me down. I treated him fairly and formally, and through the years he and I have learned to be satisfied with a mild mutual dislike and a mild mutual respect. When Dorothy and I had our own son, Edgar’s fondness for his little half-brother opened the possibility of a warmer relationship between us, but Edgar, having (I suspect) considered this, at last rejected it. He always distrusted change.

  Dorothy’s problem with me had basically the same origin as her problem with Thorp: she could never quite bring herself to accept the fact that her husband was not the man she had imagined. I had fired her imagination as a person independent of a society she had come to despise, and she was reluctant to recognize that my independence was in no way incompatible with a life in the midst of that society. She always confused diplomacy with hypocrisy. She would like to have been marooned with me on a desert island, where I, like the accomplished butler of Barrie’s Admirable Crichton, though her social inferior in civilized Philistia, would prove a monarch in the wilderness. She found it ignoble that I should manipulate the mean old world of the Stonors and Aspinwalls for our own greater comfort and glory. She could not reasonably object to a handsome style of living compatible with our joint means: the duplex Park Avenue penthouse hung with post-Impressionists and my favorite Fauves, the red brick manor and stables in Virginia, the trim sailing yacht and the fast, rattling foreign cars, but she minded my so loving these things. She was certainly never a political radical, but like some other guilt-ridden heirs of her generation, she tended to believe that the accoutrements of wealth should be accepted as duties rather than pleasures.

  As to the wealth itself, her attitude underwent the curious changes I have often, as a lawyer, observed in those who have not had to earn it. At first they make usually futile efforts to dissociate themselves from it: nothing will do but that they must be valued and loved for themselves, whatever that may be. But in time they start to adapt themselves to their insidiously comfortable burden and perhaps, in some inner recess of the mind, begin dimly to see it as somehow associated with their own worth, as even, constructively, “earned.” To the more serious-minded it becomes an instrument with which to do good, and private luxuries are now balanced with donations to worthy causes. The final step is to convert the wealth into a tool to promote the very ambition it is supposed to have stifled: its possessor becomes a philanthropist who gives his capital only where he can direct the use of the income and where his name will endure on lintels and tablets.

  Dorothy reached the last stage after we had been married only a decade. She set up a founda
tion (under my legal guidance, of course), rented an office, hired a couple of secretaries and proceeded to make large grants to applicants whose appeals she now spent her mornings reading. She disregarded my warning about charitable institutions: that their officers quite sincerely believe that the ends justify almost any means, certainly flagrant misrepresentation, and she was badly taken in by some of her biggest “investments.” She would never have discovered this had I not taken care to make the proper investigations, and although she reluctantly complied with my suggestion that she hire a professional director, I don’t think she ever quite forgave what she no doubt regarded as a “cynicism” on my part morally inferior to the basic generosity of her own nature.

  By 1938, the year of Munich, the year of compromise (I was to have my own), Dorothy and I had long settled into what is sometimes called a “civilized marriage,” though the civilization was largely provided by me. We went more and more our separate ways, she spending her days at her foundation and I at my office when I was not travelling on business. At home we had our own bedrooms, and when we entertained it was I who planned the meals with our housekeeper and selected the guests. Dorothy appeared at our parties when she wanted to and accompanied me to others when she chose. Our domestic manners on the whole were good, though she was more inclined to be openly critical than I, and, uncommonly in such a marriage, we had frequent and interesting conversations about the state of the nation and world. But in 1938 a new and acerb note was introduced into our relationship which was to threaten its precarious balance.

  Oscar, our only child, who might have been an added bond in a happier union, was instead a source of mutual jealousy. We coveted his affection and resented the careful equality of the love he returned to each of us. For he was the gentlest and justest of youths—I tend to wax maudlin in describing his character. With his looks I am less so, for they were, to say the least, singular. He was skinny and agile, with long thin limbs capable of extraordinary dexterity—he could cross his feet behind his neck. His face, pale and skull-like under short, thick, wiry black hair, was made strangely attractive by the glitter of his green-brown eyes. Intense, romantic and deeply intellectual, he might have been expected to be impatient, abrupt, even caustic, whereas, on the contrary, he was sympathetic and compassionate. With me he was always … how shall I put it? Protective? But whom did he wish to protect me from?

  In the early spring of that year Oscar was halfway through his course at Columbia Law, and was living at home, his suite in our duplex amounting virtually to a separate apartment. We saw him little enough except on weekends, and it was on a Sunday lunch that I gave for a Chicago investment banker, one Graham Barnes, that Dorothy made the remark that was further to complicate our lives.

  We were eight at table, including the Horace Aspinwalls, and our genial and good-mannered banker was questioning Horace with a lively curiosity about the ins and outs of Manhattan social life. He showed a particular interest in a discussion club of which Horace was president, the Thursday Evening Association.

  “Do you meet in a clubhouse?”

  Horace explained: “No, we meet in the homes of members who have large enough houses or apartments. There we have lectures or musicales or sometimes even a dance. The club goes back to the ‘nineties, when the younger members of society began to be restive under the Philistinism of their elders. ‘Old New York’ was inclined to be nervous about the arts. Richard Harding Davis was acceptable as a writer, and Charles Dana Gibson as an artist, and to some extent Walter Damrosch could represent music, but that was about the limit. So the Thursday Evening Association was designed to introduce society to the faculty of Columbia! Only, through the years the original purpose and Columbia seem both to have been forgotten.”

  The banker chuckled. “It sounds not unlike Chicago. You don’t find culture at the top of Jacob’s ladder. Not yet anyhow. And do you, Maury, attend these affairs?”

  “I’ve been to some, as Horace’s guest.”

  “You’re not a member?”

  “No.”

  “How is that, when your pal is president?”

  I hesitated. “I guess I figure Horace sees me enough downtown without my intruding on his evening hours.”

  “I’m afraid, Mr. Barnes, that we’re too Jewish for the Thursday Evening Association.”

  Dorothy’s tone was pointed and clear. I think my first reaction was to admire the perfect manners of the table. Nobody betrayed the least surprise. Oscar just glanced in my direction. There was a slight pause before the tactful Barnes put the question to the table as to whether Mrs. Charles Dana Gibson had been the model for the Gibson girl. That his question was immediately answered in unison by all three of the lady guests showed how welcome was the change of subject.

  After the guests had departed, I could tell from Dorothy’s air of rather defiant apprehension that she was awaiting my reproach, but of course I wasn’t going to give her that satisfaction. I simply announced cheerfully that Oscar and I had agreed before lunch to walk twice around the reservoir in Central Park that afternoon. He nodded at once, glad to separate his parents, and we set out.

  On our first round, on that cold, damp, early spring day, we exchanged hardly a word. Oscar and I had rarely discussed the state of being Jewish. He had never taken the smallest interest in any religion, adhering, like so many intellectual seekers of the truth, to agnosticism if not outright atheism, but he was much concerned with Hebraic history and tradition—he was, in short, a proud Jew. I had been careful, like my own father before me, in confining his education to New York City schools and universities, to minimize his contacts with the cruder forms of anti-Semitism until he should be mature enough to handle them, but I had long since doubted the necessity of this. He seemed from his boyhood to have taken prejudice in his stride, as a curious, objectionable but essentially manageable thing.

  On our second round I brought up the topic we had both been waiting for. “Why do you suppose your mother picked today, of all days, to put me down?”

  “Put you down, Dad? Couldn’t she have been just showing her loyalty to you and me? By identifying herself with our Jewishness?”

  “How you try to clean us up, dear boy! But come now, you heard her tone. She was trying to humiliate me. She was telling the table that she at least had nothing to conceal. She might as well have called me a snob and a toady. But why has she waited all these years until now?”

  Oscar did me the justice to drop his first line of defense. “I think she’s been brooding about it for some time. Waiting for the right moment.”

  “To stick it to me?”

  “Rather to force you into a public stand. She thinks we ought to be more Jewish.”

  “And you agree?”

  “Now, Dad.” He stopped, and I stopped. We faced each other, he now the parent. “You know I believe each man must decide these things for himself.”

  “You don’t have the feeling I’m disloyal to my forebears?”

  “No!”

  “Or a sneaking sense that I’ve sold out?”

  “Look, Dad.” He sounded almost exasperated. “You’re strong. You don’t need anything or anyone in the world but yourself. But other people need all kinds of things: love, patriotism, family, faith, what have you. Mother needs to feel she’s socially useful; Uncle Horace that he’s good. I guess I need to feel I’m a Jew. It’s natural for people to resent your independence. It’s envy, really.”

  I thought this over as we walked on, again in silence. I was interested that he had included Horace among the enviers. Horace had always been very close to his godson, who called him Uncle. Did he consider it a godpaternal duty to counteract what he may have seen as my baleful influence? And then a sickening sense of remorse so overwhelmed me that I suddenly stopped. Had my love of this serious child been simply pride? Had I not essentially left him alone to solve the problems created by my own egotism and splendid—or sordid—isolation? And had he not solved them with the love denied him by both his preoc
cupied parents?

  He had turned and was looking back at me. “You’re not going to hold this against Ma, are you?”

  “I’m not a grudge bearer. You know that.”

  “She’s not a happy person, I’m afraid. And it’s hard for unhappy people not to want to see those around them unhappy, too. Even subconsciously.”

  “Why do you suppose she’s so unhappy?”

  “Because everything she’s ever cared about—or thinks she’s cared about—has turned out to be unworthy of her ideals.”

  “Even her sacred father?”

  “Oh, him especially.”

  I nodded. Oscar was certainly shrewd. “But of course we both know who the archvillain is. Do you think, even if I tried, I could ever be anything else to her?”

  He turned the question. “No one could ever attain Mother’s ideals. If he did, she’d simply up the stakes. Give it up, Dad. Be yourself.”

  And then, ignoring the preoccupied faces of the rapidly striding pedestrians, he flung his arms around my shoulders and hugged me. My emotion was so strong as nearly to choke me. Independent? That was to laugh. I was horribly vulnerable to this wonderfully loving young man. In my triumph over Dorothy in the contest for his affection I now ruefully realized that victory was Pyrrhic. She had never really contested me; Oscar was essentially a tool to be used in her lifelong campaign to prove that Dorothy was always the wronged one. I had Oscar in the end, but he was a dagger that could be seized and stuck into the centre of my heart.

  It was not long after the Sunday lunch of Dorothy’s emancipation from tact on the subject of my ethnic origin that Horace Aspinwall came to my office to bring it up again. It appeared that he too had had a talk with Oscar. That Oscar should have had such a discussion with him at all was enough to make me quiver with resentment before I even heard what the principal question had been.