The Auerbach Will (41 page)

On the telephone, Charles is saying to Essie, “I don't know whether I have good news for you or bad, old girl.”

“What is it, Charles?”

“Your brother Abe is dead. He was found this morning in his garden.”

“Ah,” she says softly. She cannot help feeling a sudden, deep pang of grief.

“There's been talk of a gangland-style killing, because he was holding a bunch of flowers in one hand, but the Dade County Coroner's Office has ruled a simple coronary.”

“Ah.”

“I wouldn't be surprised if Joan's imminent arrival on his doorstep didn't bring it on.”

“She didn't see him, then.”

“No.”

“Ah,” she says again.

“Anyway, I wanted you to know it before you read it in the papers.”

“Thank you, Charles.”

“I had a call from the
Times
, from the reporter who's writing his obituary. They've made the Litsky connection, and asked whether he was related to you.”

“What did you tell them?”

“I fudged it. I said, ‘Possibly. It's a common Jewish name.' They may try to call you, but I hope not. I told them you were very old and ill, and couldn't be reached for questions.”

“Thank you for making me old and ill!”

“The
Times
is usually pretty gentlemanly about things like that. But you might want to alert Mary, in case there's a call, so she and I can have our stories straight.”

“I understand,” she says. “Though actually I don't mind if they say he was my brother.”

“Neither do I,” says Charles. “Because he was. But think of Josh.”

“You're right,” she says. “I understand.”

“Good-bye, Essie.”

“Good-bye, dear Charles. And thank you.”

Upon hanging up, she goes directly to Mary Farrell's office. “Mary,” she says, “has this month's check gone out to Arthur Litton?”

“Not until the thirty-first, Mrs. A.”

“Good. There'll be no more checks, Mary. He is dead.”

Mary looks quickly at her employer, then back at her typewriter keyboard. “I see,” she says.

“And if any newspaper reporters call for me, I am very old and very ill, and cannot come to the telephone.”

“I see,” says Mary Farrell.

Outside the funeral home, two heavyset men in dark suits and white neckties block Joan's entrance at the door. “Sorry, Ma'am, but your name's not on the list.”

“My professional name is Joan Auerbach, but in private life I'm Mrs. Richard McAllister.”

“Neither name's on the list, Ma'am. These services are strictly private and invitational, by the widow of the deceased.”

“I'm with the New York
Express.
”

“You ain't on the list, Ma'am. Sorry.”

“Listen, the deceased is my uncle. I'm his niece.”

“Sorry,” the dark-suited man says, tapping his sheet of paper with a pudgy finger. “You gotta be on this list. Otherwise, my orders is you can't go in.”

“Just tell me one thing,” Joan says, “is it an open casket?”

“Yeah, it's open.”

“Are his eyes open?”

“
What?
” the heavy man says. “Are you crazy? What do you mean are his eyes open? The guy is fuckin' dead.”

“I need to know the color of his eyes.”

“Wait a minute,” the man says. Turning away from Joan, he mutters to his cohort, “Al, can you take my place at the door for a sec? I got a crazy lady to get rid of.…”

“Yes?” Mogie Auerbach says into the telephone in a somewhat impatient tone. “Who is this?”

“Mogie—it's me. Mogie—I've got terrible news.”

“Joan, can you call me back in half an hour?” he says. “Tina and I are having intercourse.”

Twenty-one

Esther Auerbach, having donated the Auerbach Pavilion, is treated very much as a V.I.P. at Mount Sinai Hospital, and as her limousine pulls up in front of the main entrance on Upper Fifth Avenue, four people, who have been waiting just inside the glass doors, step out onto the sidewalk to escort her inside—the executive director of the hospital, the chief physician, and two senior members of the nursing staff in crisp white uniforms. The doctor offers Essie his arm as she gets out of the car, they cross the sidewalk, and one of the nurses holds open the door for them.

“She's going to be all right,” Doctor Roth assures her. “We were worried about possible brain damage, but she's conscious now, and seems clear-headed. We still have her in Intensive Care, of course.”

Essie nods, and they cross the foyer to where an elevator is waiting for them.

“The thing is, we're still not sure when it happened,” he continues, as the doors close. “Her maid found her early this morning. It may have been only a few hours, in which case she's very lucky.…”

Essie nods again.

“I wouldn't recommend spending too much time with her today, Mrs. Auerbach,” he continues. “No more than fifteen minutes. She's a mighty uncomfortable lady.”

Essie nods her assent to all these instructions as they leave the elevator and start down the corridor.

The Intensive Care Unit is dark and shadowy, the better to read the screens of all the computerized monitoring equipment, and its only sounds are the various little beeps from the machines and the rustle of the nurses' skirts. The head nurse leads the way now to a pale figure on a hospital bed, and Essie hears her whisper, “Your mother is here to see you, Mrs. McAllister,” and lightly touches Joan's wrist, into which an I.V. tube runs. Then she closes the screens around them, and leaves them alone. Essie, who has promised herself to be brave about all this, still feels tears welling in her eyes when she bends to kiss Joan on the forehead and to squeeze her hand. “Joan … Joan, darling …”

“Hello, Mother,” Joan says in a hoarse voice.

“Joan … Joan, why did you do this?”

“Simple … nothing to live for … lost everything … lost the newspaper … lost Richard … and now look. I'm still here.”

“Oh, Joan. Why didn't you come to me?”

Joan looks up at her with dead eyes. “Tried,” she says in that terrible rattling voice. “Stupid secretary … Mary … always said you were busy … out to lunch … Besides, you already turned me down.”

“But Joan, I had no idea things were as bad as that.”

“Were … only worse … still are … Sixty million dollars, Mother … your investment, too.”

“That doesn't matter to me, Joan. You know I'll always take care of you. All I want is for you to be happy.”

“I want to die,” Joan says.

“Oh, don't! Don't say that.”

Joan does not reply, and turns her head away from Essie, into the sheet, and now Essie can think of nothing to say. The wall of years behind them is too thick and sturdy. When Joan was little, back at 5269 Grand Boulevard, and had the measles, and had to lie in a dark room like this one, Essie would sit beside her bed and read to her by the light of a flashlight. In those days, she used to read to all the children, the three of them, Prince, Joan, and Babette, all snuggled together under the covers of one narrow bed—
Alice in Wonderland, Through the Looking-Glass
, and all the Beatrix Potter books which Essie almost knew by heart. But what is there to read to her now? What is there even to talk to her about? A nurse enters the screened enclosure and quietly and quickly checks Joan's vital signs, makes a notation on her chart, and leaves.

“Your poor newspaper, you worked so hard on it,” Essie says at last.

Joan says nothing.

“Has Richard been to see you?”

“'Course not … bastard.”

“Joan, I'm sorry.”

“Just tell me one thing, Mother. What color were Uncle Abe's eyes?”

“He had dark eyes. Dark brown. He had my father's eyes. Why?”

Joan closes her own dark eyes. “Nothing … stupid Mogie … Mother, I don't want to talk anymore. Terrible sore throat.…”

“I understand,” Essie says. “Good night, darling.” She kisses her again. “I'll be by again tomorrow.…”

“We have no idea how many she took,” Doctor Roth says as he escorts her out to her car. “There was an empty bottle by the bed. But the point is she didn't take enough to do the trick. Maybe twenty Seconals. That's not enough to do the trick. I suspect that this was an angry act. She wants to punish someone.”

“Oh, me, of course!” Essie says. “Isn't that what the psychiatrists always say? It's always the mother's fault.” And she suddenly has an ugly, irrational, unworthy and totally unmotherly thought: for the briefest moment she wishes that Joan had taken enough, as Jim Roth rather crassly puts it, “to do the trick.”

“Either tomorrow or the next day, she'll start seeing Doctor Weizman, head of Psychiatry. That's routine in these cases.”

“And there'll—there'll be nothing given to the newspapers about this, will there, Jim?”

“Absolutely not, Mrs. Auerbach. We'll see to that.”

“What's she trying to
do
, Mother?” Babette's voice screams at her over the telephone from Palm Beach. “First she pirates a third of my trust—and now
this!
”

“Well, be grateful you still have two thirds left,” Essie says. “And don't yell at me about this. I didn't let her do it. You did.”

“But I didn't
know!
I'm going to sue her, Mother!”

“Good idea. And good luck, because it doesn't sound as though she's got much left to sue for. Babette, I have more important things to think about.”

“More important
things?
What's more important than my money and my social position in Palm Beach?”

“I can think of several. Such as my dinner, which is about to be served, and which I intend to eat. Good-bye.”

Joan. What had ever made her happy? Essie never had been sure. The year was 1927, when Joan was eighteen, and when Joan was to have her coming-out party. It was for that party that Essie had first found it necessary to hire a private secretary, Agnes Lauterbach, because it was the largest and most elaborate party Essie had ever given and required months of preparation. It was true that Agnes Lauterbach was a little dictatorial, requiring—among other things—that the children make appointments to see their mother. But there was no doubt that she was efficient, and efficiency was required for a party of this scale.

The date was June sixteenth, and fifteen hundred guests had been invited. Not one but two tents had been set up outside the house—in pink and green and gold—one for dining and one for dancing, and Meyer Davis and his orchestra had been engaged from New York, at a cost, Essie would always remember, of $4000 plus travel and expenses. One hundred and twenty-five cases of champagne had been ordered from the bootlegger. The menu—tomato bisque, shrimp in lobster sauce, wild rice,
petit-pois, p
ê
che
Melba—had been worked out with the caterer, the tables and chairs had been set up, the flowers, in the same pink, green and gold scheme, had been arranged, the placecards all hand-lettered, the pink, green and gold balloons released to the top of the tents with colored ribbons trailing down, the ice sculptures of swans with bowls of caviar nested between their wings, the waiters in uniforms especially made to conform with the color scheme.… It was an era when prosperity was the only thing one talked about, when money was no object, when Jake Auerbach was being hailed as one of the richest men in America, not far behind the Rockefellers, when the country seemed to run itself. President and Mrs. Coolidge had sent their regrets, but had also sent an immense floral arrangement which had been placed in the front entrance hall. A special train had been hired to bring guests in from New York. Essie had helped Joan select her long white taffeta ball gown, the flowers she would carry, the flowers she would wear as a coronet in her hair.

The party was to start at eight o'clock, and by three o'clock, when it was time for everyone to start getting ready, when the maids had laid out the women's dresses, when the hairdresser had arrived to apply the final touches to Joan's, her mother's, and her younger sister's hair, Joan was nowhere to be found.

The house and premises were searched. Ransacked. The search became frantic. Kidnappers! Jake Auerbach cried, and the police were called, and blue-and-white squad cars lined the long front drive. A special telephone line was run in to deal with the ransom demands.

Then, at five o'clock, a telegram arrived from Milwaukee. It said:

JUST MARRIED MOST WONDERFUL MAN

JEAN-CLAUDE DE LUCY. WISH ME

HAPPINESS. JOAN
.

Crumpling the telegram in his hand, Jake Auerbach shouted, “Russian craziness!” Then he marched upstairs, locked himself in his bedroom and would not come out. When any of his children displeased him, he now blamed their “Russian genes.”

Under the supervision of Agnes Lauterbach, hundreds of telephone calls and telegrams went out, canceling the party “due to unforeseen circumstances.” The train from New York was stopped outside Detroit, and turned around, with no explanation given to its bewildered passengers until they were home again.

Of course a hundred or so guests showed up anyway, whom Miss Lauterbach had simply been unable to reach. They were given drinks, and stood about chattering nervously, not knowing whether to congratulate the absent bride or to offer condolences for the collapsed party. Essie did her best to put them at their ease. “Will someone please invent a restraining harness for headstrong daughters?” she joked. “I promise you we'll put it in the Eaton catalogue.” But the laughter was uncomfortable, and the guests soon departed.

The men in the orchestra, who had just finished unpacking their instruments, began packing them up again. The food that had been unloaded from the caterers' trucks was packed back into them once more. The waiters changed their clothes, collected their paychecks, and went home. The tents would be dismantled, and the tables and chairs taken away, in the morning. By midnight, Essie and her butler, Taki, were the only ones left downstairs in her house.