Sins of the Fathers [antikvár]

1 Soon after my return from Germany in that troubled spring of 1949, my boss asked me if I would marry his daughter. It was, as I at once realized, a unique occasion. Although I was approaching middle age and not unsophisticated, I had never before been proposed to by the father of a would-be bride without either her knowledge or her consent. 'Well ?' said Cornelius encouragingly before my speechlessness could become an embarrassment to us both. 'What do you say?' I knew exactly what I wanted to say. The Germans had a phrase for it. '¦Ohne mich^ I had heard them say again and again during my recent trip. 'Count me out.* And those terse words had soon symbolized to me all the exhaustion and disillusionment of postwar Europe. ''Ohm michV I now responded automatically, too appalled to be diplomatic, but luckily Cornelius knew no German. As he looked blank it occurred to me that I had just bought myself a few precious extra seconds and I at once used the time to pull myself together. As soon as he had said coldly: 'Pardon me?' I replied without hesitation: 'That means "what a happy suggestion!" * and gave him my warmest smile. The twenty-three years which I had spent working as an investment banker on Wall Street had perhaps overdeveloped my talent for survival. We were sitting in his office at the bank, and beyond the french doors the sunlight of early evening slanted across the patio. The bank, a huge Renaissance-style relic of the nineteenth century, stood at One Willow Street on the corner of Wall, but the senior partner's office at the back of the building might have been a hundred miles from the noisy streets of downtown Manhattan. In the patio the magnolia tree was in full bloom, reminding me of summers kretrievably lost, the summers in Maine on the estate where my father had been the head gardener, the summers in Germany in those sunlit days before the war. The beauty of the magnolia blossom suddenly seemed unendurable. I had to avert my eyes, but when I glanced around the room I saw the bleak furniture, the violent primary colours in the painting above the