The Auerbach Will Page 5

  And so he goes to the nearest window, draws aside the heavy drapes, raises the light-proof shade, and then lifts the window sash an inch or two, pausing, his chin cupped in one hand, to give the image of his face a fond sizing-up in the dark glass. A chill December wind blows in from Beekman Place. On the street, a private guard, making his rounds, does not look up. I would have made a splendid homosexual, Mogie thinks, having come to this conclusion from several clandestine encounters in the past. He returns to his desk, opens the lowest left-hand drawer fully, and presses a finger against the back panel of the drawer, which falls open. Inside this second compartment are a small cloisonné footed box, said to have come from the Palais de Versailles, an ivory pipe, and a box of kitchen matches. He removes these objects, and opens the box. Inside is what appears to be a small cake of clear golden soap. With a penknife Mogie scrapes and pares several shreds of this amber, waxy substance, and tamps these shavings carefully and compactly into the rounded bowl of the pipe. It is pure, uncut hashish from Izmir.

  Mogie picks a match carefully out of the box, strikes it across the sole of his shoe, and lights the pipe, inhaling deeply. The night outside is very still.

  He sits at his desk, studying the photograph. Somewhere in all of this, he thinks, lie the seeds of a delicious little plan. There they all are, the early members of Eaton & Cromwell’s board—his father, Abe Litsky, Charles Wilmont, George Eaton, Cyrus Cromwell, much younger than when he had ever known them, but still recognizable. He sits back, draws again on his pipe, waiting for the rush of insight to come, for the seeds to germinate.

  Suddenly he puts the clipping down. The answer is not there, not quite, but Mogie is quite sure where the answer can be found. When Mother broke up her house at The Bluff, Mogie fell heir to several family scrapbooks and, in his informal role as family historian, he has kept them up. They repose behind locked glass doors in one of his many bookcases. He rises and goes to the bookcase now, unlocks it with a key from his watch fob, and removes two albums. He returns with them to his desk, and slowly begins turning pages. Their lives fan out in front of him, in chronology, but with a gap, since the two photo albums he has chosen are one of the oldest and one of the most recent. He studies the children’s faces, his own, Joan’s, Babette’s, Josh’s, their parents’ and the faces of their parents’ old friends and business associates, Charles, Daisy Stevens—everyone, of course, except Prince—watching them all grow older as the pages turn. It is not long before he has selected two clear and well-focused snapshots that will suit his purpose perfectly—one from the older album, one from the newer. Ah, he thinks, sucking deeply on his pipe, ah, dear darling Joan, Queen of Greed, what elegant fun we are going to have with you. Ah, the luxury of mischief, especially when perpetrated by Mogie Auerbach, the Renaissance Man!

  Beside his elbow, a buzzer sounds and, with his free hand, he picks up the interhouse phone. “Yes, my darling?”

  “Aren’t you ever coming up to bed, honey?”

  “Just be patient, darling,” he says in a soothing voice. “Daddy’s just finishing some work on his article. Then he’ll be straight up.” And he adds, laughing softly, “And that pun is intended.” But first he marks the places in the albums with two white slips of paper, returns the albums to the bookcase, closes and locks the door with his little key, smiling and whistling softly to himself.

  In another part of town, on West Tenth Street in Greenwich Village, where Karen Auerbach Collier Schofield has kept an apartment since her divorce, Karen lies naked across her bed with a cold washcloth folded across her forehead. Daryl Carter who sits, fully clothed, on the bed beside her, lifts the cloth gently, refolds it, and replaces it so that the cool side is down. “Feeling better now?” he asks her.

  “Parks,” she says. “You work for the parks. There’s a statue of my grandpa in a park. Lincoln Park. That’s in Chicago.”

  “You’ve just had a little too much to drink,” he says, his eyes carefully averted from her nude body.

  “So what. What’s that got to do with parks?” Her head rolls sideways toward him. “Aren’t you going to make love to me?”

  “I think—not tonight.”

  “Or,” she giggles. “Or. Or.”

  “Or what?”

  “Or are you gay?” Giggling again, she says, “I think you are. I think Mr. Parks is gay.”

  “Well, I’m not.”

  “Not even a little bit?”

  “Not.”

  “I had an uncle who was gay.”

  “Oh? What happened to him?”

  Another giggle. “Family secret. Pots and pots.”

  “Pots and pots of what?”

  “Secrets. Pots and pots of family secrets.”

  “I had no idea your family owned Eaton and Cromwell.”

  “Yup. All of it. Pots and pots of it.”

  “Golly. You must be really rich.”

  “Oh, yeah.” She closes her eyes. “Especially Granny. Not my mother, though. She just spends it.”

  “Your mother is—quite a woman.”

  Her eyes flutter open. “Now you just leave my mother out of this,” she says. “What’s she got to do with anything?”

  “Sorry. But you brought her up.”

  “Just leave her out of this,” she says. “Besides.”

  After a pause, he says, “Besides what?”

  “Besides,” she says. “Besides, you’ve made me forget what I was going to say.”

  “And your family is—Jewish.”

  “Not Jewish,” she says. “Jew-ish. That’s different, you know. We’re Jew-ish. Just a little bit Jew-ish. Just a little bish—I mean bit. Like a little bit south of North Carolina. Besides, my father wasn’t Jewish. Just Mother.”

  “I see.”

  “But don’t go bringing up my mother again. Besides, I think you’re gay.”

  He stands, and in the same movement reaches down and pulls the coverlet up across her. “I think I’d better go now,” he says. “Get some sleep.”

  But Karen reaches up and seizes him tightly by the wrist, her long polished fingernails digging into his flesh, and says, “No. Stay. I want to talk to you. Fix me another drink.”

  “I think you’ve had—”

  “No.” She pulls him down beside her again. “Listen to me. No one ever listens to me. I want to tell you everything.”

  He studies her pale face on the pillow, the blond hair, damp now and clinging to her temples from the cold washcloth, and the outline of her thin body under the coverlet. Tossed on a chair beside her bed is the pale green evening dress, the shoes, the underthings that he has helped her remove. For a moment or two he says nothing. Then he says, “Tell me how old you are.”

  “Thirty-two.”

  “That’s not possible. You have a daughter in college.”

  “Thirty-four, then.”

  “Even so—”

  “Besides, she was my husband’s daughter by an earlier marriage.”

  “But she has your same name.”

  “Of course. She was my husband’s daughter. I adopted her.”

  “But your mother’s over seventy. She must have been … well on … when you were born.”

  “Right. She was.”

  A hesitation. Then, “I think—you’re older.”

  Karen sits straight up in bed, the coverlet falling from her bare breasts. “There!” she says. “See? See the way you are? Always dragging my mother into it! And while you’re asking all these nosy questions—how old are you?”

  “Twenty-five. I can show you my driver’s license.”

  Her head falls back across the pillow again. “Oh, no,” she says. “I don’t want to see your driver’s license. Where did I meet you, anyway?”

  “At P. J. Clarke’s. Now I’ve really got to go.”

  From the outer corners of her eyes, two nearly identical tears flow downward toward the pillow. Her hand still grips his wrist tightly. “Oh, no,” she says in a small voice. “Don’t go. Lie down beside me. It’
s cold in here. Lie down beside me and keep me warm.” With her eyes tightly closed, she says, “In the old days—when I was a girl—I was considered to have—great—charm.”

  With his free hand, he works as gently and yet as firmly as possible to release his wrist from her grip.

  Three

  “Who is that woman in the picture?” one of her grandchildren would occasionally ask when, years later, they stumbled on one of the old photograph albums with their brittle pages filled with yellowing snapshots, which used to lay about on tables at The Bluff.

  “Her name was Daisy Stevens,” she would say. “She was an old family friend.”

  Daisy Stevens’s picture would begin turning up in the family albums in the year 1918. Essie remembers the year for two reasons. For one thing, it was in September of that year that Jake and Essie’s second son was born. They had named the baby Martin, but by the time he got to Lawrenceville and Harvard he had permanently acquired the nickname Mogie. And it was in 1918 that Essie had first met Daisy Stevens, when she had come to a party at The Bluff, as they had named the Lake Forest estate, a party to celebrate the Armistice between Germany and the Allies that had been signed in November of that year.

  This particular morning, in her apartment at 710 Park Avenue, Essie has been thinking of Daisy Stevens again, though she has heard little from her in nearly fifteen years. Not long after Jake died, she knows, she had received an announcement in the mail saying that Daisy had married a man named Burton St. George, a widower and, Essie believes, a stockbroker. Of her doings in the years since, Essie knows little, though Daisy would be a woman in her early eighties now. Still, Jake had not been particularly generous to Daisy in his will—a bequest of merely fifteen thousand dollars in cash—and, for whatever reasons Jake had for being so miserly with Daisy, Essie wonders if now is not the moment to set things to rights.

  It has been a busy morning. Essie has spent it with her lawyer, Henry Coker, redrafting her own will. Jake had never trusted lawyers, and Essie supposes that she has inherited some of her distrust from him. “Make the decision, draw up the plan, and then tell the lawyers what you’re going to do,” he used to say. “Then, by God, if anything goes wrong, let them straighten it out. If you ask them ahead of time what you ought to do, you’ll never do anything.” Also, as he grew older, Jake became convinced that the lawyers were hovering around like vultures, ready to snatch up for themselves whatever crumbs there were from the estate. Still, Essie got along well with Henry Coker.

  “I want a will,” she told him, “that can’t be broken by any disgruntled member of my family, Henry.”

  “That’s exactly what we’re going to give you, Essie,” he said.

  “Can we insert a clause to the effect that, if any of my legatees attempts to take action to break the will, that legatee will be automatically disinherited?”

  “We most certainly can.”

  “Good. Now I want it made clear that immediately upon my death, or if I am taken to a hospital prior to my death, this apartment is to be locked and sealed. No one is to be admitted. The insurance company has a full inventory of everything that’s here, of course, but I don’t want anyone even trying to come in and snitch anything.”

  Scribbling notes on a pad of yellow legal cap, Henry Coker nodded.

  “Then, immediately upon my death, Mr. Hubbard or his representative from the Met is to be invited in, and he will be told to pick out anything he wants for the museum. Anything he wants. What he doesn’t want is all to be sold at auction. I don’t want any of them quarreling over my things, you see.”

  “I understand.”

  “Now, Joan and Babette and Mogie will all be taken care of comfortably, of course, and their children and my great-granddaughter. But the major share—fifty percent—of my estate I want to go to my youngest son, Joshua. You can write it in such a way as to say this is not to be considered a case of favoritism. It is simply because Josh is the only one who’s ever really given a damn about the company.”

  “Yes,” said Henry Coker.

  “And now,” said Essie, “I’d like to bring up a point. I’d like to ask you a question in confidence.”

  “Everything we talk about today is in the strictest confidence,” Henry said.

  Essie hesitated. “Let me put it this way,” she said. “If any member of my family should claim—should claim to have evidence, or should threaten to claim—that my son Joshua, who will be my principal heir, is not a legal member of this family, could they, using that, try to break the will?”

  “I’m not sure I follow you, Essie,” Henry Coker said. “What do you mean by ‘not a legal member of the family’?”

  “Just what I said, Henry.”

  “Do you mean that Joshua was adopted? Or—”

  “No, no. I meant—not legal.”

  Henry Coker’s eyebrows rose just slightly. “Oh,” he said. “I think I see what you mean, Essie. You mean that Joshua is not, was not—”

  “Was not Jacob Auerbach’s son.”

  Coker cleared his throat. “Yes,” he said. “Well, of course Joshua has already inherited substantially from his father—I mean from your late husband.”

  “I know. But I’m talking about what I want to give him. If that came out, would it make a difference?”

  “Only,” he said, “in the sense that someone might try to blackmail him with that knowledge. But I don’t think Joshua Auerbach is the sort of man to sit back and let himself be blackmailed over something that is, after all, a private and secret matter between you and your Creator.”

  “And now you,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “Will it make any legal difference—with the will?”

  “None whatever. After all, Joshua was raised as Jacob Auerbach’s legal son. Jacob Auerbach’s name is on the birth certificate—even if he may have been, as you suggest, illegitimate.”

  “Are you absolutely certain, Henry? I want to be very clear on that point.”

  “Absolutely. For one thing, after your death Joshua’s parentage can only be a matter of speculation. For another, your will is what it says it is—your will. Under the terms of your will, you can do whatever you will with your estate. You can disinherit all of them, and leave everything to a hostelry for homeless cats—if that’s your will.”

  Essie sighed. “Good,” she said. “I’m glad to hear that. As you can imagine, it’s been something that’s been weighing on my mind.”

  “I understand,” he said.

  “How much is it, Henry?” she asked him.

  “How much is what?”

  “My estate. How much am I worth?”

  He smiled and spread his hands. “Dear Essie, I really don’t know,” he said. “I can’t give you a firm figure. Of course I could have the office put together some figures, and get back to you in a couple of weeks.”

  “No, no,” she said. “Don’t bother. I guess I’d rather not know.”

  “I know this—it’s vast,” he said.

  “Yes. That’s the trouble with it, isn’t it?”

  Henry Coker had then cleared his throat. “But to get back to the point you brought up earlier,” he said. “About Joshua’s parentage. There is one small problem that you should be aware of, Essie.”

  She sat forward in her chair. “Yes? What’s that?”

  “Your late husband’s trust instrument, under which Joshua and the other three children derive income.”

  “What about it?”

  “I shouldn’t have said that there is a problem there, but that there might be.”

  “Please explain what you mean.”

  “Well, unfortunately—unfortunately, the way the instrument is worded—and I know because I drafted it—”

  “Please get to the point, Henry. You’re upsetting me.”

  “Your late husband’s trust is directed specifically ‘To my son Joshua Auerbach, et cetera, et cetera.’ Therefore, if anyone—one of the other beneficiaries of the trust, for example—sho
uld have reason to believe that Joshua is not Jacob Auerbach’s son, the trust could be challenged. On that technicality.”

  “And broken?”

  “There’s that possibility. I’m not saying that such a challenge would be successful, but that it might be. Similarly, it might not.”

  “But it would have to be proven, wouldn’t it?”

  “Presumably, yes.”

  “How could it be proven, Henry?”

  He hesitated. “I don’t want to ask too many questions, because I don’t want to know the answers. I don’t want to know who the boy’s natural father is, I’m not asking you that. But just tell me this. Is the boy’s father living?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, then, unfortunately there are ways of proving paternity. Rather recent medical procedures. A complicated series of blood tests performed on the mother, the child, and the alleged father. It is called the Human Lymphodite Antigen test. Courts have ordered it performed in cases where there was—a question of paternity.”

  Essie said nothing.

  “I don’t want to alarm you, Essie. But since you’ve told me this, I felt it was my duty to alert you to this possibility, however remote, that there could be a challenge—not to your will, but to Joshua’s trust from his father, or rather from your late husband.”

  “And the trust is everything he has.”

  “Well, very nearly everything.”

  “And they could get their hands on it.”

  “They?”

  “Joan. Mogie. Babette.”

  “Put it this way—they would have a legal basis on which to try to do something of the sort.”

  “And it would be just like them. Thank you, Henry. You’ve eased my mind on one score, and given me a whole new worry on another.”