Wicked Pleasures (3 page)

His only concern was the small Frederick, increasingly naughty, even before his first birthday. Frederick was a beautiful, charming child; his nurse idolized him, and the young governess, specifically hired to teach him his letters and numbers, thought he was so wonderful that she managed to persuade herself that it must be her own fault, not Frederick’s, that he found the mastery of them rather more difficult than might have been expected.

A benign conspiracy built up over the years, concealing young Frederick’s just slightly limited intelligence; but by the time he was thirteen and due to go to school, facts had to be faced. Of course he could go to the Collegiate school, and indeed Mr Praeger would add lustre to the parental roll, but young Fred was clearly not going to be one of the star pupils. He sat, comfortably and cheerfully, very near the bottom of the class for five years, popular, happy, a star on the sports field to be sure, with a particular talent for athletics and tennis, and managed, with the addition of some vigorous extra coaching, to just about scrape through his final examinations. His years at Yale were spent similarly, with sex added to the range of his accomplishments; but he was at twenty-one so good-looking, so amusing, so infinitely socially desirable, that it was comfortably easy for his father to ignore his limited intellect and install him in what came to be known as the Heir’s Room at Praegers (next to his father’s office), especially fitted out to young Fred’s specification, with antique furniture, Indian carpets and the very latest in modern technology, including a ticker-tape machine and a telephone on which he spent much of the day talking to his friends. He spent most of his time buying and selling his own stock, taking exceedingly long lunch hours and showing a great many young ladies around the bank, greatly overstating his own role in it.

Early in 1894 Frederick I died suddenly and unexpectedly, of a heart attack, still not entirely blind to his son’s shortcomings, but convinced that he had many years in which to improve young Fred’s banking skills. It was his one great folly; Frederick II was in fact rather less well equipped to run Praegers than the boys who ran messages all day long between the bank and the Stock Exchange in Wall Street. This did not greatly concern him; he looked at the assets of the bank, found it inconceivable that they should be in any way vulnerable, and proceeded to fritter them away (literally at times, so great was his penchant for gambling, both on and off the floor of the Stock Exchange) to
rather less than 40 per cent over the next five years. Clients abandoned Praegers; portfolios shrank; partners resigned; returns on equity were down almost to break-even point. The senior partners were heard to remark to one another over luncheon that it was as well old Mr Frederick had died, it would break his heart to see what was happening.

Mercifully for everyone concerned, a happy event occurred. Young Frederick fell in love, with a wholly delightful young person called Arabella English. Arabella, whose father was employed (in quite a lofty capacity) in Morgans, understood banking, and had heard a great deal about the tragedy of what was happening at Praegers. On receiving a proposal of marriage from Frederick II she accepted it with immense graciousness and pleasure, advised him to talk to her father the next day, and in the intervening twelve hours suggested to her father that he might, as tactfully as possible, suggest a more dedicated approach to the bank by her Frederick, if he genuinely desired to marry her. So in love was Frederick, so desperate to gain the approval of old Mr English, that he would probably have obeyed if English had told him to hang from the sixth floor by his ankles for ten minutes every morning in order to improve his business performance.

The reform was dramatic. Frederick II was in his office by ten each day, and stayed there until well after four (long hours indeed for those golden days), in growing command of the market; he lunched only with clients; he read only the financial papers (once breakfast was over); he managed to approximate as closely as was possible for a person of his abilities to a first-rate banker. When Frederick Praeger III was born in 1903, there was once again a considerable inheritance for the young princeling.

Frederick III was an interesting child; he had, along with the classic Praeger blond good looks, all the instinctive skills for making money displayed by his grandfather, combined with a formidable talent for politicking. Those around him became vividly aware of both qualities when at the age of seven he asked his nursemaid to give him a quarter to put in the school charity box. His mother, he explained, untruthfully but moist-eyed with earnestness, was too busy with her social arrangements to see to such minutiae, and the nanny, incensed (as any good nanny would be) by such a display of maternal selfishness, promptly gave him fifty cents. Frederick invested this in a packet of peppermint humbugs, bought on the way to school, the chauffeur having been persuaded to stop for a moment so that he could buy an extra apple for his lunch box. The peppermint humbugs were then sold for a penny apiece to the other children; Frederick returned at the end of the day one dollar fifty up on his initial investment. By mid-term he had made over twenty dollars. He did not need twenty dollars; he just liked the knowledge that he could earn them at will.

By the time he was twenty-five he was buying and selling the equivalent of peppermint humbugs at the bank with equal skill, and playing off the rather intense relationship he had with Nigel Hoffman – one of the senior partners who was also his godfather, his department head and a man of considerable brilliance – against the more prickly one with his father, who was already uncomfortably aware that when it came to both skill and hunch, his son and
heir was considerably his superior. Young Fred would eat lunch with Hoffman one day, tell him he felt his father was holding him back, treating him like a child; the next he would confide over dinner to his father that he felt Hoffman expected too much of him. As a result Fred II became over-protective, anxious not to burden him with too much responsibility, and Hoffman gave him an ever freer rein. If he made a mistake, young Frederick could blame Hoffman; if he did well, he could point out that he deserved more responsibility than his father gave him. He couldn’t lose.

By the time Fred-the-Third, as he was always called, fell in love with Betsey Bradley, who was working as a stenographer at Praegers, he was in a more powerful position than anyone at the bank, including his father, who had finally abdicated his position in everything but name, and was spending most of his waking hours on the golf course and playing backgammon at the Racquet Club.

Fred III had pulled off a particularly remarkable coup and secured Fosters Land as an account, thus greatly increasing his standing both within and without Praegers. Fosters was a vast, billion-dollar development company, whose awesomely young chief executive, Jackson ‘Jicks’ Foster, had been at Harvard with Fred, and had called him one morning and dropped his gift into Fred’s possession as casually as if it had been a pair of cufflinks. Outside the Praeger specialty as it was, Fred still managed the business superbly, and the friendship between him and Jicks Foster was never shadowed for a day by any professional cloud. When Frederick III brought Betsey home for the first time and announced that she was the only girl in the world for him, his mother was not happy. Arabella wasn’t unkind to Betsey, rather the reverse, she was charming and gracious and went out of her way to draw her out and encourage her to talk. Nevertheless, she confided to Frederick II that night that there was no way on God’s earth that she was going to allow young Fred to marry Betsey, she would wreck his future, and be no kind of a wife to him at all.

Arabella spoke very firmly to young Fred about his choice of bride, saying much the same things as she had said to his father; young Fred looked at her coldly and said he loved Betsey, she was the wife he needed, and if Arabella wasn’t going to accept her, then he would have to think very hard about severing connections with his parents altogether.

The rift between Fred III and his mother caused by his marriage was papered over, but never properly repaired; and its far-reaching effect on Fred was to send him out of his way to hire and promote young men from the less well-to-do and aristocratic families, partly to irritate his mother, but partly from a deep conviction that the streetwise and hungry would work harder and more cannily for him than the over-indulged upper classes. Which in turn had its effect on the personality of Praegers, giving it a rougher, tougher profile than most of its fellows on Wall Street. But perhaps the greatest irony of all, as Fred III often remarked, was that Betsey in the fullness of time proved to be just as big a snob as her mother-in-law, and spent long hours reading etiquette books and getting herself put on to charity committees as well – although never the same ones as Arabella.

The young couple settled down to a surprisingly tranquil existence; Betsey had been reared to look after her man, and look after him she did, in every possible way, running his home with an aplomb that impressed even Arabella. She was not only efficient, sharp and tough, she was warm and loving and a tender and caring mother to Baby Fred born in 1935 and Virginia in 1938. It was a source of great heartbreak to both her and Fred, who had planned for a huge family, that after the birth of Virginia, when Betsey very nearly died, the doctor insisted on a hysterectomy.

In lieu of more children Betsey demanded a new house. She liked the family home on East 80th into which they had moved, after the deaths of Fred’s parents within one year. But she had always hated the overgrown cottage Fred II had built near East Hampton, and she wanted something more substantial and to her taste.

‘All right, go and find yourself a mansion. Just don’t bother me with it until moving-in day. I’ll just sign things. All right?’

‘All right,’ said Betsey, and went and told the chauffeur she would be needing him that day to take her out to Long Island.

‘We move in tomorrow,’ she said to Fred one Thursday the following September. ‘You only have to let Hudson drive you out to the Hamptons in the evening, rather than come home here. I have clothes for you at the new house. I think you’ll like it.’

Fred did like it. Beaches stood proudly high on the white dunes, near a small inlet into which the ocean swung, creating two facing stretches of sand. It was a great white mansion of a place, built in the colonial style, with huge sweeping lawns at the back (studded with white peacocks, a long-time fantasy of Betsey’s ever since seeing
Gone with the Wind
) dropping right down onto the white dunes. The house had three vast reception rooms, eight bedrooms, a playroom, a den; outside there was a tennis court, a pool and a pool house, a football patch for little baby Fred, a stable block, and a massive sun deck with a heated conservatory for when the breezes blew in a little too harshly from the Atlantic. Betsey had decorated the house with considerable restraint (given her natural rather excessive inclinations, to be seen in full flower in the gilded Louis Quinzerie of East 80th), and it was all shades of sea colours, pale blues and greens and every tone in between, with honey-coloured polished wooden floors, pale rugs, and a great deal of wicker and chintzy furniture. Fred and the children walked in and fell in love with it; and Fred told Betsey that night in bed as he tenderly began removing her nightdress, that if he had ever needed to be reassured that he had married the 101 per cent right person, Beaches and what she had done with it had clinched it for him.

Virginia in particular had always loved Beaches. It was a place where she and Baby and Betsey spent time on their own, in the school vacations, Fred visiting only at weekends, and she was removed from the relentless pressure of trying to please him, struggling to win his approval, to do better than Baby. She relaxed there, could be herself, enjoy quiet pleasures like walking by the sea,
adding to her collection of shells, playing the piano, reading, riding sedately along the shore, without having to worry about her hands, her seat, her pony’s too slow pace. Virginia had two ponies, one she loved and was happy on, called Arthur, a round, placid little grey, and another she disliked and was afraid of called Nell, a dancing, prancing chestnut, a show pony whom Fred insisted she rode whenever he was there, alongside Baby on his equally spirited bay, Calpurnia. Fred would follow them on a huge chestnut hunter, watching them, urging them on: those rides were a nightmare. Virginia would sit, tense and uncomfortable, trying to convince herself that she had Nell under control, dreading Fred’s shout of ‘Come along then, off we go, come on Virgy, kick on, kick on’, the petrifying fear as Nell stretched out into the gallop, the dread of falling, the greater one of being run away with. Baby would fly ahead, whipping Calpurnia, whooping with pleasure; Fred would canter along beside her, urging her to keep up, and even in her terror she could sense his irritability, his contempt. She used to arrive back at the house shaking, sweating, grey-faced with exhaustion, often physically sick (refusing just the same to allow Betsey to know how afraid she was, lest she spoke to Fred about it), thankful only that it was over for the day, perhaps even for the whole weekend. But during the week she would saddle up Arthur and set out alone, simply walking, or trotting easily and happily on the ocean edge and riding, she knew, a great deal better.

Baby, who would in the fullness of time become Fred IV, had been called Baby Fred from birth, and had become just plain Baby at Harvard, even though he was (fortunately for his reputation) six feet four inches tall and the most brilliant halfback of his generation. He was not, so far, showing quite every sign of being a worthy successor to the bank; he was clever, quick and charming, but he had a considerable aversion to hard work, only passed his exams by the time-honoured method of last-minute crash swotting, was permanently overdrawn at the bank, and spent a great deal of time not only on the sports field and the tennis court, but at parties, dances and the Delphic Club where his considerable dramatic talents found great expression in the Hasty Pudding Theatricals. He also was to be found extremely frequently in the arms (and the beds when he could accomplish it) of the very prettiest girls. He had his grandfather’s golden looks, thick, blond hair, dark blue eyes, wonderful, flashing, infectious smile, and something too of Fred II’s immense
joie de vivre
and somewhat irresponsible dedication to the pursuit of pleasure. Fred III, who had vivid memories of his father, and had heard much folklore about the appalling mess he had thrown Praegers into during the early part of his rule, was haunted occasionally by seeing a similar pattern evolving for Baby. But his anxiety was tempered by a pride in and love for Baby that was literally blindingly intense. Virginia, arguably cleverer, certainly harder working, more responsible, morally impeccable, would have died happy for half such indulgence from her father.