Sins of the Fathers (8 page)

‘Alicia—’

She whirled round on me. ‘You’d do it too, wouldn’t you?’ she said, her voice trembling. ‘You’d marry her! All Cornelius has
to do is make sure he cracks the whip hard enough – but on second thoughts, no, why should he need to crack a whip? You’re
being offered a beautiful young girl, access to the Van Zale fortune, and the prospect of your children having all the social
advantages you never had! It would take a better man than you, Sam Keller, to turn that kind of offer down!’

I felt the heat throbbing behind my skin but I kept my temper. I said in my politest voice: ‘I’m in love with someone else
and I plan on
marrying her soon. Vicky has no appeal for me, Alicia, Other people may see her as the most eligible heiress on the Eastern
Seaboard, but to me she’s just a mixed-up little schoolgirl who calls me Uncle Sam.’

‘So Cornelius will have to crack the whip after all. What does it matter? The end result will be the same. You’ll marry her,’
said Alicia, and walked out, slamming the door in my face.

For a moment I stood listening to the distant whine of the elevator, but at last I wiped the sweat from my forehead, returned
to the den and removed the Glenn Miller tape from the silent machine.

[3]

I wanted to call Teresa but I was too afraid of interrupting her work and making her even angrier than she had been earlier.
I wanted to drink to numb the sexual tension which was making me restless, but I knew I had already had too much to drink
that evening. I wanted to stop thinking of the life I might have had if Paul Van Zale had passed me by, but I was so depressed
that for a long time I could only sit slumped on the couch while I wallowed futilely in my dreams of provincial domesticity.

I told myself I sentimentalized domesticity because I was a bachelor, but that very obvious explanation did not make my dreams
less attractive. Then it occurred to me that I might be sentimentalizing domesticity because I was a German, and at once the
dreams lost their power to charm. I reflected how odd it was that different nationalities picked different subjects to sentimentalize.
The British were sentimental about animals. The French were sentimental about
l’amour
. The Americans were sentimental about violence, glorifying the Wild West and now the Second World War in a steady stream
of Hollywood movies and Broadway shows. I thought of Rodgers and Hammerstein unerringly touching that sentimental streak in
the vast American sub-conscious by producing first
Oklahoma
and now – starting tomorrow –
South Pacific
.

I made a mental note to look out the tickets which I had bought long ago for the coming Saturday night. I had planned to surprise
Teresa. I would still surprise her. My depression began to lift at last. After all, everyone knew that a successful love affair
was seldom one long upward curve on the graph of happiness, but tended to fluctuate, like the stock market; just because the
Dow Jones Industrial Average slipped occasionally, nobody automatically assumed the economy was heading for disaster.

I was just planning how I would propose again to Teresa over a champagne supper following a show-stopping performance of
South Pacific
, when the phone rang.

I grabbed the receiver. ‘Teresa?’ I said breathlessly.

‘Who? No, this is Vivienne. Is there any news, Sam?’

I was amazed by how completely I had forgotten her. ‘Vivienne!’ I said. ‘Gee, I was just about to call you. Yes, Vicky’s fine
– she’s back home again now so there’s no need for you to worry any more.’

‘Has anyone told Vicky I’m in town?’

‘I told her myself, but she doesn’t want to go to Fort Lauderdale right now – she’s set her heart on going to Europe with
Emily. I’m sorry, Vivienne, I did my best to push your cause.’

‘There’s only one cause you push, Sam Keller!’ she said bitterly, not believing me, ‘and only one master you and your hatchet
serve!’ and she slammed down the phone as violently as Alicia had slammed the door in my face.

I went to bed and dreamed of a world in which I was my own master. I went to bed and dreamed of a world without Cornelius.
I went to bed, and in my dreams I moved back through the looking-glass to the blue skies and bluer seas of Bar Harbor. I went
to bed and dreamed …

[4]

I dreamed the nightmare which had disrupted my sleep at regular intervals since the outbreak of war in 1917. It had changed
over the years to encompass certain new experiences but it always began with the same true incident from my past: at the age
of nine I had walked into my school classroom to find that someone had written on the blackboard: HANS-DIETER KELLER IS A
NO-GOOD GERMAN PIG. Then a gang of older boys had beaten me up and I had run crying all the way home.

At this point in my dream the truth and I parted company and fantasy began. The fantasies varied but the theme remained the
same; I accepted Nazism in order to have my revenge on those who had hurt me, and then I rejected it for destroying so much
that I’d loved. The rejection scenes were always accompanied by violent images, swastikas stained with blood, bulldozers shifting
mounds of corpses, cities incinerated by fire-bombing, but that night as all the familiar appalling pictures streamed through
my mind, my dream led me down a terrible new path. Without warning I was walking again across the
polluted earth near a small town in Germany, and as I thought again of all those who had died I heard the GI at my side whistling
‘Lili Marlene.’

I awoke gasping, switched on all the lights and groped my way to the den. My fingers somehow managed to put a record on the
phonograph. I had to play a tune from the past to negate the end of that nightmare, a happy tune from a happy past, so I picked
the record which recalled all my most carefree memories of the summer of 1929 when Cornelius and I had given wild parties
together and celebrated our twenty-first birthdays with illegal champagne.

Miff Mole and his Molers began to play ‘Alexander’s Ragtime Band’.

After I had played the record three times I felt calmer, calm enough to recall the past truthfully without emotion. Anti-German
sentiment had been common in 1917 and my family had probably suffered less than other German-American families since my father
had refused to be intimidated. After the incident in the classroom he had hung a large American flag on our front porch and
announced to the principal of my school that my constitutional rights as an American citizen would be violated unless steps
were immediately taken to reprimand my assailants. The principal, a fair-minded man, had responded satisfactorily and the
rest of my schooldays had passed without incident. It was my father who had suggested that it would be better if I had an
American name. He had favoured Hank, since it was similar to Hans, but I had insisted on Sam, the cowboy hero of a popular
comic strip.

I devoted the following years to becoming thoroughly American. My father insisted that there need be no conflict in my conscience
since Germany had done nothing for us while America had given us everything. His remaining family in a small town near Berlin
had been wiped out in 1918 but he refused to speak of his loss. My mother lost two brothers in the war but one sister in Düsseldorf
survived to remarry in 1920, and I often had to make secret journeys not to the post office in Bar Harbor but to the post
office in Ellsworth in order to mail food parcels to Europe. Once it took me ten minutes to summon the nerve to enter the
post office because I was so ashamed to betray any German connection.

I became a very good American. I got straight As in high school and took the prettiest girl to the Junior Prom and I figured
out a way to work my way through law school by doing summer gardening on the Bar Harbor estates. I ate turkey with cranberry
sauce on Thanksgiving and set off fireworks every Fourth of July and sang ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ louder than anyone else
on every patriotic occasion. I even
started speaking English when my parents and I were alone together, but my father put a stop to that because he said it was
a great advantage to be bilingual and that I must on no account let my German lapse.

He did not like his employer Paul Van Zale but being a practical man he had no trouble accepting the benefits which Paul could
offer his employees. My parents were well-paid in their positions as gardener, housekeeper and caretakers at the Van Zale
summer home, and when Paul selected me to be his protégé my father was the first to shake my hand.

‘This is what being an American’s all about, Sam,’ he said to me. ‘This is your big opportunity. This is every immigrant’s
American dream.’ And he told me I should go down on my knees and thank God I was a citizen of the finest country in the world
where even the poorest man could become rich and successful.

I became rich. I became successful. I lived on Park and dined on Fifth and dealt daily with the Eastern Seaboard aristocracy
who inhabited that palace at Willow and Wall. And then one day in 1933 I stepped out of the all-American world of my all-American
dream, and later when I stepped back nothing was ever the same again.

I went back to Germany. I saw my native land again for the first time since I was two years old, and I found an odd little
Austrian with a toothbrush moustache was saying it was no shame to be German. I found too that Germany was beautiful, more
beautiful than I had ever imagined and far more beautiful than my parents had ever dared to tell me in their efforts to abort
their homesickness and bring me up as a good American. By the time I found my German relatives who had survived the war America
already seemed far away, a view glimpsed fleetingly through a thickening mist, and all the time the funny little Austrian
was telling me I should be proud to be German, until at last – at long last – I was proud.

People probably think me such a practical, down-to earth, hardheaded businessman; they probably never realize that despite
my iron grasp of reality – or perhaps because of it – I have to have my dreams, my American dream, my German dream, even my
sentimental dream of domestic bliss. War propaganda has fostered the image that the Germans are mindless machines, but no
machines built those fairytale castles in Bavaria and no machines wrote some of the world’s finest literature and no machines
cheered the Berlin Philharmonic over and over again in the thirties whenever they played Beethoven’s Ninth. I shall never
be the fascist robot my enemies want to believe I am,
never. My dreams are too important to me. Even now, when my German dream was dead and my American dream was dying before my
eyes I had still managed to find a European dream to sustain me. Once more I pictured working for the ECA, and my last coherent
thought before I fell asleep was: thank God it’s not too late to start again.

However once the sun woke me at seven the next morning I had no choice but to put my new dream back on ice until the circumstances
were more favourable. I dragged myself off the couch in the den where I had fallen asleep. I forced myself to go through the
ritual of showering, shaving, dressing and eating. And finally, when no further postponement of the inevitable was possible,
I summoned my Mercedes-Benz and set off downtown once more to the bank at Willow and Wall.

[5]

As soon as I reached my office I buzzed for my personal assistant, greeted and dismissed my secretary, sampled my first cup
of coffee, hung up my hat, glanced at the mail, scanned the headlines of the
Wall Street Journal
and moved to the mantel to adjust the Dresden china clock which had once belonged to Paul Van Zale. The knock on the door
came just as I was opening the glass face.

‘Come in!’ I shouted.

The door opened. I saw him in the mirror, tall as his father had been before him but spare and dark, his eyes bright in his
pale thin face.

‘Yes, come in, Scott,’ I said abruptly, and glanced back at Paul’s clock. It was one minute slow.

‘Do you want the correct time, Sam?’ said Steve Sullivan’s son, always so anxious to help, always so eager to please.

‘No,’ I said. ‘It doesn’t matter.’ Snapping shut the glass face I turned my back on all reminders of Paul. ‘What’s the latest
news on the Hammaco bid?’

‘Bridges McCool have definitely dropped out of the bidding but the other syndicate’s still in the ring with us – I just checked
to make sure. Oh, and here’s the market report you wanted.’

‘Thanks. You’re looking very dishevelled! Have you been up all night?’

‘No, Sam, I fell asleep at my desk by mistake at two this morning.’

‘Well, never let me see you show up for work like this again! You’ll
impress no one, least of all me, by looking as if you’d just walked out of a Bowery flophouse!’

‘I’ve managed to get hold of a razor—’

‘I’m not interested in how you plan to improve your appearance. Just fix it and fix it pretty damn quick.’

‘Yes, Sam,’ said Scott, faultlessly obedient, utterly respectful, and withdrew.

I immediately regretted my abruptness. Scott had a special place in the Van Zale family; he was the stepson of Cornelius’
sister Emily, and since 1933 Cornelius had shared with Emily the responsibility for his upbringing. Scott’s mother had died
in 1929, his younger brother Tony had been killed in the war, and his father, once a senior partner of Van Zale’s, was also
dead, so it was only natural that over the years he had drawn close to his stepmother and her family.

I thought of his dead father Steve Sullivan who had fought Cornelius for control of the bank back in the thirties. I thought
of Cornelius saying long ago: ‘Of course it’ll be difficult to eliminate him …’ And I thought of my role in that elimination.

I had told myself afterwards I had no choice but to obey orders, but the War Trials had long since put that unattractive defence
in its proper place, so to ease my conscience all I could now do was attempt to forget the entire incident. However this had
proved impossible. Even if I had the talent for forgetting what I didn’t want to remember, Scott’s presence at the bank would
always have prevented me from perfecting this idyllic state of amnesia.