The Auerbach Will (36 page)

“How much is whatchamacallit—economy?”

“The round trip coach fare is two hundred and seventy dollars.”

In her open bag, Joan finds her wallet, and produces three hundred-dollar bills. “Well, you and your airline are very fortunate,” she says. “I don't usually carry this much cash.”

“Ah,” the black woman says, and the extraordinary smile reappears. She accepts the cash, and begins again the finger-work at her machine that will produce the ticket.

“And I must say this is all very inconvenient,” Joan says. “This will leave me very short of cash until I can get to a bank.”

The relentless smile continues as the crimson fingertips glide across the keyboard as a weaver might move a shuttle across a loom.

“I'm astonished that Eastern Airlines would question my credit. My credit is good everywhere. I can show you Saks, Bergdorf's, Bonwit's—”

“Eastern Airlines does not accept credit cards from department stores, Mrs. Auerbach. Nor do any of the other carriers.”

“And I'm astonished that you don't know who I am. Have you ever heard of my father, the late Jacob Auerbach? He did a great deal for your people, you may recall.”

The smile is unchanging. “I can give you a center seat in the nonsmoking section of the aircraft.”

“I prefer smoking, please, and on the aisle.”

“I'm sorry, Mrs. Auerbach, but I only show one seat remaining, a center seat, in the nonsmoking section of the cabin.”

“This is absolutely preposterous,” Joan says.

“Perhaps, as you board your aircraft, if you speak to one of the flight attendants, he or she may be able to change your seat assignment.”

“Mr. Borman is definitely going to hear about this!”

Still smiling, the young woman hands Joan a ticket envelope and three ten-dollar bills. “Flight number two-seven-five to Miami will be departing from gate thirty-three at four twenty-five. Please be in the gate area at least fifteen minutes before departure time. Thank you for choosing Eastern, and have a nice day.”

Outside, the March night is very cold, so cold that icy patterns have formed on the windowpanes of Essie's apartment on Park Avenue, but Yoki has drawn the heavy drapes snugly closed, and built a fire in the library fireplace, where the Chandor portrait of Jacob Auerbach stares sternly down at Essie and Charles Wilmont. Charles rises to refill their glasses from the decanter at the bar.

“I hope you're right,” Essie says.

“I'm sure I am. I trust Abe.”

“I've never trusted him!”

“It's an honor-among-thieves thing with him, Essie. He made a deal with you years ago. It may have been a dishonorable deal, but it was a deal, and he'll have the honor to stick to it.”

“But Abe's an old man now, Charles. Suppose he gets weak in the knees? The way I sometimes get weak in the knees these days.”

He hands her her glass. “It used to be me who got weak in the knees—remember?”

“But never for long,” she says.

“You helped me then.”

“Ah.…”

A distant siren from a police car or an ambulance whines from the street below. Some day soon, Essie thinks, an ambulance will come whining through the night for her. The Life Squad. It is a term that has come into use rather recently, it seems, and Essie dislikes it very much. It has a military ring, it sounds obscene. It shouldn't require a squad to save a life. A life isn't worth a squad in the end. It reminds her of a Riot Squad, soldiers with nightsticks and teargas come to put down a violent rebellion. A life, at the end, shouldn't be defended with nightsticks and bombs. “It isn't so much me,” she says. “I don't care—at this point—how I get judged. That really doesn't matter. But it's the other children. And the grandchildren. Young Josh. And Linda. I don't want to see them hurt. Difficult as some of them may be, I just don't want to see them hurt.”

“Essie, I assure you Abe will tell Joan nothing—if, in fact, he'll even see her. She's on a wild-goose chase. All the secrets are safe.”

“Again, I hope you're right.” A silence. Then she says, “Two. Two of them. Joan and Abe. It takes two people to make trouble. One person can't make trouble by himself. It was something Jake used to say.”

“Look,” Charles says, “I've dealt with Abe before. Do you want me to try to deal with him now? Call him? I will, if you want me to.”

Essie consults her watch. “It's late now. I don't think we should call him this late at night. He'll think we've panicked. Never let them know you're running scared. ‘If they smell your fear, they'll attack, just like a dog.'” She looks up at the portrait. “Another great piece of wisdom from the late, great Jacob Auerbach. Maybe call him—very casually—in the morning.”

“Whatever you say.”

She rises, a little stiffly, from her chair, drink in hand and goes to the window and parts the curtains. Outside, a flurry of tiny snowflakes blows in the wind.
Der shtrom fun menshenz maysim bayt zikh finer.…

“Charles,” she says, “it's horrid out. Why don't you spend the night here? Will you spend the night with me?”

“Of course,” he says.

The affair with Daisy Stevens ended, as these things usually did for the newly styled Arthur Litton, when he gave her a return ticket to Los Angeles, and announced that he would be staying on in Reno for an indefinite period. Daisy converted her ticket to a ticket to Chicago, on the theory that, if nothing worked out there, she would only be a short hop from Columbus, and home. On the train, she read with interest of Jacob Auerbach's benefactions.

“There's a Miss Stevens on the telephone,” Jake's secretary said to him.

“Miss Stevens? Who is she?”

“She says she's a friend of your brother-in-law's.”

Jake hesitated. “Very well. I'll talk to her,” he said. He picked up the phone and answered it with a guarded “Yes?”

“Oh, Mr. Auerbach,” Daisy said in her brightest voice. “How nice to talk to you. I'm a friend of your brother-in-law, Arthur Litton, and he asked me to call you when I got to town.”

“My brother-in-law is not named Arthur Litton,” he said.

She laughed. “He is now,” she said. “He changed it. He told me you'd know him as Abe Litsky.”

“What does he want? Is he in some kind of trouble?”

Daisy had not been prepared for this sort of question, and yet she was somehow not surprised by it, and knew intuitively how to answer it. “I must see you,” she said.

“Very well,” he said, and looked at his watch. “Come to my office at three o'clock.”

At three o'clock, Daisy Stevens was in the great philanthropist's office, looking her best. He rose to greet her, but did not immediately ask her to sit down, nor did he offer her his hand.

“Tell me what this is all about,” he said. “What's he up to now?”

“It's not that he's in trouble—yet,” she said carefully. “It's just that I'm afraid that he will be before long.”

“What about?”

“He's become a very heavy gambler. When I left him, he was in Reno. Reno is not very nice to people who don't pay their gambling debts. There could be trouble—with the authorities.”

“Sit down,” he said, and when she had, he asked, “How well do you know my wife's brother?”

“Very well, Mr. Auerbach.”

“Are you—romantically involved with him?”

“Certainly not.”

“You may get the impression that I am not overly fond of my wife's brother. This is true, I'm not. He has at times threatened to be a considerable embarrassment to us, to myself and my company. Tell me—can you control him?”

“Yes, I think I can.”

“I mean, specifically, can you keep him out of Chicago? Can you keep him out of our hair?”

“I think I can, Mr. Auerbach.”

“He's like the bad penny, you know, who always turns up. I never want to see or hear from him again, do you understand?”

“You need a buffer zone,” she said.

“Correct.”

“And you can't trust your wife to be that buffer zone.”

He threw her a sharp look.

“I could provide that buffer zone, if I worked for you,” she said. “Because I know how Arthur—or Abe—operates.”

He riffled through some papers on his desk. “You seem to be an intelligent young woman,” he said at last.

“I can type, and I can take shorthand,” she said.

“And you're also a very attractive woman.”

“I've worked as a model. I could model clothes for your catalogue!” She stood up and twirled around. “I have a nice figure, I think.”

“Yes,” he said quietly. “But it would also be very like that brother-in-law of mine to send an attractive woman to my office as part of a scheme to get something out of me.”

“Oh, no, Mr. Auerbach!”

“How can I be sure of that?”

“I have a very low opinion of Arthur Litton, Mr. Auerbach. Please take my word for that.”

“Well, if this is part of some scheme, out you go, young lady.”

“Do you mean you'll give me a job, Mr. Auerbach?”

“I think we can find a place for you in this company,” he said. “And I also think that you have some reason for wanting to even a score with this man who calls himself Arthur Litton.”

Daisy smiled. “That's true,” she said.

“So do I,” he said. “In which case, we ought to get on very well.”

And so Daisy Stevens came into the lives of the little family, in the role of one of Jacob Auerbach's secretaries.

Essie had never inquired much about what other women there might have been in Jake's life before he and she had met, though she was certain there had been several. His expertise on their wedding night had been demonstration enough of that. It was not that she wasn't curious about who these women might have been, and what they looked like. And she occasionally tried to picture Jake in bed with another woman, or a series of faceless creatures. It was an era, after all, of a double standard, where young women were expected to be chaste and virginal, and where young men were expected to be just the opposite. It was also an era when things that happened at night were never discussed in daylight. Essie's own grasp of the facts of life, learned from her mother and from other girls her age, had been, until her marriage, very sketchy and vague. All she had really known was that terrible, crippling diseases came from intimate relations with a man who was not your husband. And yet young men, after being given the same lectures about venereal diseases, were routinely taken by their fathers to visit prostitutes, to be taught by experts in the ancient art of sex.

Jake's mother had alluded, obliquely, to earlier romantic attachments of Jake's. They had been, Essie gathered, intense, but rather short-lived. It had all been a part of what Lily Auerbach—and her son's alienist—had seen as her son's tendency toward indecisiveness, his inability to stick to any one thing, to follow through. “He had a pattern of starts and stops,” Lily had once said. “He'd be terribly enthusiastic about something, or some person, one minute, and then completely lose interest in the next. He was always coming home saying, ‘I've met the girl I'm going to marry!' Two weeks later, we'd ask about her, and he'd have forgotten her name. I really began to wonder whether he'd ever marry. When he said he wanted to marry you, I confess that I assumed that this was just another of his passing fancies. Well, I was wrong.

“I must say this for you, Essie,” Lily had said. “You've made him reverse that pattern. You made him grow up at last.”

“Bear in Garia,” Babette kept repeating, sitting on the blue chaise longue in her mother's bedroom, dressing and undressing one of her dolls. “Bear in Garia. There is a bear in Garia.”

“The
Berengeria
” Essie said. “That's the boat your papa and I are taking to Europe next month.”

“Why are you going?”

“Because the war is over, and people are traveling again. And because I was so little when I left Europe that I can't remember it. And because your papa hasn't been since he was a little boy, and there are all sorts of places we want to visit.” She sat in front of her mirror, pinning up her hair.

“Why can't I go too, Mama?”

“Because you're too little, and because you and Joan are going to a wonderful camp in Maine for the summer, where there'll be canoes and sailboats and horses and hikes, and where you'll have a wonderful time.”

“Will Jake get to go on the Bear in Garia?”

“Hans is taking Jake to a ranch in Wyoming, where he'll learn all about pioneering days in the West.”

“I suppose that brat Martin gets to go.”

“No, silly. He's much too little. He'll stay right here with Miss Kroger. Don't worry, when you're all older you'll all have trips to Europe.”

“Are you going to Russia, where you were born?”

“No. They've had a revolution there. The Reds run Russia now, and they want to take over the whole world, which Americans don't want them to do.”

“Where will you go, then?”

“Let's see. England, Holland, Belgium, France, Germany, Austria, and Italy—I think that's the way your papa's planned it. I'll send you letters from every place, and tell you all about it.”

“Bear in Garia,” Babette repeated. “I want to go on the Bear in Garia.”

From the society columns:

Mr. and Mrs. Robert Rutherford McCormick entertained at a small dinner dance last night in honor of their friends Mr. and Mrs. John Jacob Auerbach, who will soon depart for New York to sail to Europe for the summer. For the occasion, the dancing tent, set up on the lawn of the McCormicks' Lake Forest estate, was decked out in a nautical theme, with sailing burgees, papier-mâché life preservers, and a bandstand built to resemble a ship's prow.… Mrs. John Jacob Auerbach, whose green eyes are almost as famous in Chicago as her big green emeralds, wore a gown of palest blue moire, with a chiffon overskirt. A pair of white orchids in her russet hair completed the ensemble.…