Sins of the Fathers Read Free

just as I knew Cornelius would always be the boss and I would – if I were sensible – always be the right-hand
     man, but I wasted no time dwelling on it. It was just a fact of life to be accepted sensibly without a fuss.
    ‘You bankers!’ said Kevin when we occasionally got drunk enough to reminisce to him about the less publicized events of our
     shared past. He made no secret of his contempt for Wall Street but he followed our careers with the vicarious interest of
     a writer perpetually on the lookout for new material. In 1929 when Kevin had abandoned Harvard Law School to live in New York
     he had intended to be a novelist but only one novel had ever been written. For years now he had written plays, the early ones
     enjoyable, the later ones increasingly puzzling, and had long since left his fashionable Greenwich Village garret to live
     in a fashionable Greenwich Village brownstone west of Washington Square.
    Kevin loved his house. Cornelius had once suggested that the house was a substitute for the family who had never forgiven
     Kevin for leading a life which they could only regard with disapproval, and even if this theory remained non-proven there
     was no denying that Kevin had spent large sums of money on creating a showpiece home for himself. Hating to leave the house
     unattended he even went to the trouble of converting the top floor into a studio apartment for a caretaker. His caretakers
     lasted about six months. Young, attractive, invariably blonde and always female they were either writers or painters or sculptors;
     musicians were prohibited because they made too much noise. The girls were delighted to have a rent-free apartment and an
     uncomplicated relationship with an employer whohad no interest in beating a path to their bedroom door, but the inevitable quarrel always came when Kevin refused to lend
     them money. Kevin could be tough. I heard young male guests had been ejected from the house with similar incisiveness although
     Kevin seemed to prefer to live alone.
    He was living alone – apart from the current caretaker – when he had invited me to his party the previous Christmas, and as
     it turned out I was the only one of his three Bar Harbor friends who accepted the invitation. Jake was away in California
     and Cornelius, who had not enjoyed the previous Christmas party, made some excuse not to go.
    ‘Don’t know why you want to go and mingle with a bunch of queers,’ said Cornelius, but I just laughed. Other people’s sexual
     tastes were of no interest to me, and besides Kevin gave the best parties in town.
    When I arrived at his house about forty people were screaming elegantly at each other beneath the crystal chandeliers in Kevin’s
     large old-fashioned living-room. Kevin served the usual cocktails to cater to conventional American taste, but the hallmark
     of a Daly party was that the guests had the opportunity to get drunk on champagne.
    Unfortunately a grateful client had given me a surfeit of champagne earlier that day at lunch. ‘I’ll take a scotch on the
     rocks,’ I said to the hired butler, and was just eyeing a dish of caviar when someone exclaimed behind me: ‘You must be jaded!
     What kind of a guy turns down free French champagne?’
    I swung round. A plump young woman with wild curly hair, a large nose and a wide mouth was smiling at me. She wore a scarlet
     dress which fitted badly, and a gold cross on a chain around her neck. Her eyes were very narrow, very bright and very dark.
    ‘You can’t be anyone from show-business!’ she added laughing. ‘They
always
drink champagne!’
    ‘No kidding, I thought they took baths in it. Are you an actress, Miss—’
    ‘Kowalewski.’
    ‘Pardon me?’
    ‘Teresa. I’m the new caretaker.’
    I was greatly surprised. This girl could hardly have been more different from the willowy well-educated blondes whom Kevin
     usually employed.
    ‘What happened to Ingrid the Swedish girl?’ I asked, saying the first thing that