“Sure — it’s tough. I know. It hits you hard,” was the extent of his attempts to sound out the measure of my sorrow and show his willingness, if necessary, to console. I have to admit he handled with a degree of delicacy the problem of disguising his relief that I didn’t appear to be hopelessly distraught, while preparing for the onset of a possibly vicious delayed reaction. And there was, in any case, that air of frank confidingness (so unlike my father), that bluff disavowal — I’m sorry if I have no conscience, if I have no shame, but it’s not my fault — that thick-skinned, businessman’s charm.
But I knew just how thick-skinned he really was. I had seen him with his hand trembling — I would see him, twice again in my life, with his face as drained of vigour as it was on that day. I knew his weakness. His tactical strength was his strategic disadvantage. Even I could see that, with all its fraught implications, with all its dangerous blend of the expedient and the needful, Sam saw in me a bizarre substitute for Ed. (And you gotta have substitutes.) That he side-stepped the dread question of his surrogate paternity — not to say his entire adult responsibilities — by this appeal to the chummily fraternal.
And he was right to prepare for a delayed reaction. He underestimated, that’s all, the extent of the delay and the persistence of the reaction. It seems that I’m a slow burner, a long-term investor of emotions.
We returned, briefly, to Berkshire in April ’46, to follow my father’s coffin, then permanently in June to settle in his home. I had a strong sense now of its being “my father’s house” rather than “home,” though my mother rapidly began asserting her proprietorial rights. Furniture was replaced. Decorators appeared. There was plainly money on tap. The little gallery of framed photographs from above the sideboard, recording the “India days” (cane chairs; verandahs; turbans; polo sticks) disappeared one morning in the van of a man collecting for a jumble sale. I did not believe, any more than my mother, that the place should become a shrine to her husband’s memory, but I felt the injustice. And I felt, as the physical remnants of my father were whittled away, the accretion, as it were, of his ghostly stock. It was his house. He may not have earned his plot in the ethereal fields of fame, but he had left this solid enough memorial. It was the husk of his life.
I should have protested. I should have said, at least, about those photographs: take them from the dining-room, if you will, but let me keep them in my bedroom. But the hypocrite and the coward in me stopped my tongue.
They got married the following March. There was a decent interval in which she practised being a widow and Sam, to give him his credit, kept his relative distance, turning up only for plainly licentious weekends. It’s true, he had much to occupy him. He was sowing (also) the seeds of his little empire — spreading the bright new gospel of polymers. I still have a vision of him offering his New World marvels to a depressed and war-wrecked England. The picture merges with all those smiling GIs, in their jaunty jeeps, handing out gum and being kissed and garlanded in the ruins of liberated villages. This was not Sam’s experience, but he was built in the appropriate mould, and perhaps even imagined himself in the same blithely triumphal role.
Unlike many of his countrymen hustling their way round Europe in those days, Sam did not simply have a suitcase full of nylons, he had a father in Cleveland with a factory that made nylons and, young as he was, a sound working knowledge of industrial chemistry. Above all, he had an inborn flair for business. I think of Sam as a perpetual juvenile in all other respects, but in business he had powers beyond his years.
Of the origin of the flair, of Sam’s parentage, of “old man Ellison,” clearly one of America’s leading plastics pioneers, I know very little; only that he and Sam had had a falling out, the roots of which seemed to have been the old man’s egotism and Ed’s death. There was Ellison senior, the self-made tycoon, and there was Ed at the bottom of the ocean. And in between the two was Sam, the dutiful, filial protégé, the safe, underwritten, overshadowed, guilt-ridden schmuck. Sam had to go his own way or become the eternal stooge. The necessary scenes of confrontation and rebellion should have prepared him, you might think, for my own act of rebellion in flatly refusing (I could see it coming a mile off) his own bountiful offer of a life in plastic. He might have been mercifully inclined, even nostalgically respectful. Not a bit of it. There was not even what I took to be old Ellison’s final compromise: a sizeable pay-off and the injunction to get lost and get rich.
Like father, like son. I wonder. In going his own way, you could say Sam only did in reverse what his own father had done some decades before when he upped sticks and crossed the promise-laden Atlantic. Sam pitched his hopes in the opposite direction, in an old continent which history had nonetheless turned into a new wilderness, where opportunities abounded for the bold and the resourceful and where it was still possible, in such callings as plastics, to be a pioneer. Thus he partook of that post-war spirit of inverse colonialism which beguiled and affronted the exhausted folk of the old world — yet which, in Sam’s case, was to be reversed yet again, to melt in that grotesque dream of actual assimilation, actual assumption into the true, old world.
But the release from paternal oppression also gave the perpetual kid-at-heart within Sam its liberty. Thus it was that, with a view to a little holiday, a little sight-seeing before the serious business of life began (and with Ed’s robbed youth as well as his own to think of), Sam came to Paris.
It seems to me now that, but for my father’s extreme action, my mother might have been for Sam only a ship that passed in the night. He was too soft-centred a soul simply to run away from the mess, and he found himself caught. But this is only one interpretation, and it begs the question of who was the predator and who (or what) was the prey. There was the factor of my mother’s (i.e., my father’s) money, which would indubitably have come in handy for a young man pledged to an independent life, let alone to setting up his own business. However big the cut he received from old Ellison, Sam must have been running through it fast enough in Paris. My father died; Sam saw his opportunity. It would, of course, be interesting to know whether he saw his opportunity before my father died.
Then there was the factor (I cannot overlook this — I heard the squeals from the bedroom) of sheer carnal compulsion. They hit it off. I have to say it. Sam brought to a yielding ripeness the full fruits of my mother’s womanhood, poorly tended as perhaps they were by my father. Perhaps because of his obligation to function for two, Sam was on some sort of biological overdrive. But — I have to say this too — my mother could give as good as she took. And in all this she was not blind. Sam was the blind one, at least when his eyes (I only quote an expression he once used, with rare self-appraisal, of himself) were only in his balls. I think she took stock of her precarious seniority. She gave herself an interval of fleshly fulfillment, during which time she would set Sam up (the question still stands: how much was Ellison Plastics my mother’s work?), and thus enjoy, in her mellower years, with a little diplomatic flexibility (the biological overdrive was an ongoing thing), both the rewards and the control.
An image of Sam, indelible in the memory, from one of those weekends during our first months back in England. A sultry summer’s night; I get up to fetch a glass of water: Sam on the landing, stark naked, caught between bedroom and bathroom, and in a state of livid tumescence. He drops a hand in almost maidenly alarm. He says, “Oh, hi, Billy,” with a kind of strangulated nonchalance, as if we have met on some street corner. Never thereafter is the encounter mentioned by either of us.