The Young Apollo and Other Stories

by Louis Auchincloss

  Father shook his head sadly, and I saw Mother actually smile. "No, I guess you can't," he murmured.

  "And when you're settled up there," Mother intervened, with a decisive cheerfulness, "we'll bring little Philip up to you."

  2

  I started building my career around the law firm that at first existed only in my resolute imagination, by the unlikely stratagem of returning to the wily old shyster whom I had so abruptly abandoned when Clara died. He was glad enough to have me back, for with age his forensic abilities had begun to tatter, and I propped up his failing practice until his sudden and dramatic demise in the midst of an impassioned oration to a jury. The publicity of this collapse helped to cover up some of the ineptitude of his final phase, and control of a too-long-cowered firm passed easily into my awaiting hands. I made a junior partner of the ablest of his clerks and discharged the rest. From this point on, I saw to it that every new member of the firm was a man on whose personal loyalty to me I could count.

  Of course it was my rapidly growing fame as a litigator that drew them to the firm. When I agreed to represent a client, I was concerned, perfectly properly, with only two factors: was his case either winnable or capable of a good settlement, and could he pay my high fee? It was said of me, I know, that I could have got Judas off with a suspended sentence, but I took it as a compliment. I have always been aware that true justice was not invariably promoted by my victories in court, but let those who wail about this devise a better system. If I was never much concerned with what some sentimentalists call the "spirit" of the law, it is also true that I never broke one. A trial to me is a game to be played, and why play a game in any way but to win?

  It may have been true, in the early years of my practice, that my indifference to the heavy cost to defendants of what my critics called the grossly inflated damage awards that I obtained from juries sprang from my feeling that such defendants, after all, were northerners who had ravaged my homeland. Yes, that is possible, but it certainly didn't last, and later I achieved some significant victories over corporations in the South. I do not think today, despite my stand on desegregation, that I can be rightfully accused of any regional bias. And one thing I have assuredly observed is that fame, even fame as a tricky lawyer, brings not only a half-reluctant popularity but actual esteem.

  In building my firm from a handful of lawyers to its present size of fifteen partners and thirty associates, I have not followed the procedure of many of the major downtown firms in selecting partners, sometimes exclusively, from the ranks of clerks hired directly out of law school, with the hope of creating a homogeneous organization of dedicated members. No, I have never hesitated to grab a promising outsider and take him in as a partner even ahead of those who have toiled longer in the vineyard. Anyone who objects can go elsewhere. Nor have I ever stooped to the fashionable anti-Semitism or anti-Irishness of some Wall Streeters. I have not only brought in many Jewish lawyers, I have even used the language of flagrant racism to make them acceptable to prejudiced clients: "What you need, you see, is just what you don't like: a rough, tough kike of a lawyer who won't look under every bed for a scruple." Nor have I succumbed to the craven preference of so many firms for the elegantly trained products of Harvard and Yale law schools; I have always regarded my firm as the real law academy from which my clerks must graduate. Not that I spurn Harvard, but Fordham does me just as well, sometimes better. I would have taken Negroes, but their time had not yet come, and I have never been a pioneer.

  Which brings me to how I have been able to maintain absolute and still undisputed control of my firm. Needless to say, it has not been an unconscious process. Let us suppose that I had been retained by the president of a large company to represent it in a particular litigation in whose field my trial talents happened to outweigh those of its general counsel. I would alert my partners to the need of cultivating the corporate officers of the new client and somehow conveying to them the knowledge that we had skill in corporate affairs as well as jury trials. In the flush of my subsequent court victory there was sometimes the occasion for a grateful company president to move all his business to my firm. But in assigning a junior partner to this new account—for I couldn't do all the work—I never, as did so many managers, allowed him to take over the client. Busy as I was, I was always kept abreast of the client's problems, and attended the more important conferences, and occasionally lunched or dined with its chief officers. This was usually enough to maintain the illusion in the client that I was always primarily in charge of its matters. Sometimes it didn't work, and there were occasions when I had to expel a too greedy partner from the firm. But I usually made a great point of being all genial smiles, acting as a kindly uncle to the younger men who came into the firm, asking them to my country house for a weekend and even loaning them money for their struggling families. I think they even took a certain pride in my reputation downtown as a benevolent despot. It is something to be well known, even at that price.

  I knew the story that was circulated about me. It was said—and widely believed—that a daring partner had once come to me to suggest a more even split of the net profits among the members of the firm. "Good, good," I am supposed to have blandly replied. "Divvy them up in any way that seems fair and square to you. So long as I get my fifty percent, I don't care what you do with the balance." Well, of course no such discussion ever took place, nor do I take anything like such a lion's share of our earnings. But there is some truth in the fable.

  What really keeps me in power is that the firm as a whole recognizes that it owes its health and prosperity basically to my efforts and reputation. Otherwise the authority that I exercise would not be tolerated. Now we are approaching the time when my grip is bound to be loosened. But the legend of old Langdon Rives, mellowing with age and still a formidable figure at the bar, has swollen to the point where even my most envious juniors are more anxious to use it and promote it than to blow it away. If you become a landmark, you become a permanent part of the landscape. It might take an earthquake to tumble you.

  I should turn now from the firm to my domestic life. Yes, I married again, but I'm coming to that. First was the business of raising my son, Philip, who shared with me the increasingly grander residences that I acquired as my income waxed: the Beaux Arts mansion that reared its overornamented but only forty-foot-wide facade on East Seventieth Street and the inevitable red-brick Georgian manor house in Westbury, Long Island. I have never been one to hide my light under a bushel. Philip had everything a lad could desire: a swimming pool, a tennis court, a horse to ride, membership in any club he cared to join, and a father willing to entertain house parties of his friends. And no, he did not turn out to be a disappointment to me, as you might have expected from the above.

  Indeed, he proved in many ways the ideal son and heir. At least he would have been to any parent with less unreasonable requirements. He was very handsome, favoring his mother, with thick black hair and large, dark, brooding eyes, pale skin, a trim muscular figure, a bit on the slight side, and a charming courtesy of manner, more like that of a French or Italian youth of good birth than an American. To watch him enter a room and join a group was to watch an act of gracefulness. An able student, a competent athlete, at ease with both his own generation and mine, he fitted smoothly into the routine of my busy life. Why wasn't he perfect? Maybe that was just the trouble. He was.

  The fault, of course, was mine. It seems it always is. I wanted more than he had to give. I wanted his love. I wasn't loved by my partners, and I had given too much of myself to the law to have more than casual friends. My parents were long dead, and Clara's family had never forgiven me for taking her north. What my second marriage gave me I shall come to, but it wasn't love. For that I turned to Philip.

  Mind you, I could never fault him. He treated me with every show of respect and friendliness. He showed an intelligent interest in my cases; he was a pleasant companion on our vacation trips; when his pals came to visit, he always included me in their jo
kes and discussions. Away at boarding school and later at Yale, he wrote me newsy and informative letters.

  What was wrong was that for all his charm and goodness, for all his wonderfully controlled patience and temper, the boy could not find it in his heart to give me what he was too sensitive not to feel that I craved. He would have simulated love if he could have, but he was far too honest to do so. He would have cut his tongue out rather than admit that he was ashamed of me. But that was it. To him I was a shyster.

  This had to come out when he went to law school. Indeed, I was surprised that he chose law at all, though now I rather wryly see it as not unlike Benjamin Cardozo's joining the bar as a chance to redeem the family name from his father's corrupt use of his judgeship. Did Philip choose a legal career to atone for mine? Crazy as it sounds, I'm afraid so.

  He became an editor of the Yale Law Journal, but he never submitted the "notes" or "decisions" that he contributed to that distinguished periodical in draft to me. When I read them, I saw why. They were entirely concerned with the role of law in the development of a more egalitarian society, with the problems of remedial legislation, with misconducted trials and hoodwinked juries, and his principal piece dealt with the danger of excessive jury damage awards.

  It was not, therefore, any surprise to me when, on his graduation, Philip instructed me that he was declining the job that I offered him in my firm and was joining Legal Aid instead. The time had come at last for some plain speaking between us, and despite my natural irritation, I felt a small throb of pride that Philip was so evidently up to it.

  "I might as well put it to you frankly, Dad."

  "What better way?"

  "Well, in my possibly too prim opinion, your firm doesn't make any significant contribution to society as a whole."

  "You mean that my devising of a perfect legal tool is no use to society? What did society want but a system of justice where every wrong could be righted? My firm is finely constructed to achieve just that purpose. If I were a Praxiteles, it would be deemed my masterpiece!"

  "But it overcompensates, Dad. And not all your clients' wrongs are really wrongs."

  "Then it's up to the bar to strengthen the opposition! It should be the best against the best, my boy. That's how the best is accomplished—at least in America."

  "But in the meanwhile, those who are not the best get trampled on."

  "They are not my affair, Philip."

  "But they may be mine. Which is why I'm going where I'm going."

  At last I gave in to my temper, even knowing it was a mistake. "Supplementing your miserable salary with the money that I've settled on you, earned, of course, by my trampling on the weak."

  "Money is just money, Dad. It's only the use it's put to that counts. You've told me that often enough. You gave me that money to spend as I chose. If you want, I'll give it back."

  Quickly now, I beat a retreat. "No, no, no, dear boy. It's yours to keep, and there'll be more, no matter where you practice law. But it's not, you know, that I haven't contributed substantially to Legal Aid myself. Why, I think they even gave me a plaque. It must be somewhere around here."

  "I know that, Dad. But you never offered them legal services, either your own or those of any lawyer in the firm."

  "Damn right I didn't! They were welcome to my money but not to my genius. That I keep for the real tests. And honestly, Phil, I think you might show a little more appreciation of a father who has always cared for you and provided you with everything you could want or need."

  "Dad, you know that I appreciate all that! But now I'm treating you as a man who's entitled to the truth from his son. And nothing but the truth. Isn't that how you treated your own father?"

  "What do you know about how I treated my father?"

  "All that Granny once told me. You saw him dooming you to live in what you considered a wasteland, and you broke away."

  "Are you implying that my firm is a wasteland?"

  "Of course not, Dad."

  I should have known better than to go to my wife for comfort. Irina had a bleak Russian way of assuming that facts couldn't hurt.

  "I suppose he meant that your firm was a kind of moral wasteland," she commented mildly, as if she were describing a variety of soup.

  "Irina! Surely you don't think anything like that of my firm, do you?"

  "Oh, no, dear. But Philip is so strict, so moral. My aunt Olga was the same way. And the poor dear czarina was like that. Maybe she got it from her grandmother, Queen Victoria."

  "And look what happened to her," I muttered.

  Philip and his stepmother had formed a kind of alliance, not in any way against me but not including me. She liked his utter honesty as she liked mine, but I call it a "kind" of alliance because Irina had left too much of her heart in czarist Russia to view her American chapter as much more than a restful and not too disagreeable finale. She was beautiful, serene, charmingly kind, and vaguely sympathetic, but always detached. She had lost her husband and son in the war with Germany and had escaped the Reds by fleeing her vast Ukrainian estates on a British freighter across the Black Sea. She had joined some fellow White Russians, all penniless, in New York, where she had found work as a French teacher in a fashionable girls' school.

  I had met her at a dinner party given by one of the school's trustees. The latter might not have invited a lowly instructress, but New York society was well aware that Princess Irina Sobieski had been the landlady of a hundred thousand former serfs and an intimate of the imperial family. Society was also aware that she reached a constant hand toward their pockets for indigent kin, but after all, one could always say no. I didn't, which was one of the reasons, perhaps even the principal one, that she married me. But I was shrewd enough to know that she was exactly what I needed, and so it proved.

  I had no need of a housekeeper; I already had a most efficient one, whom my indolent Irina was glad enough to retain. I didn't need a mother for Philip, who was already in boarding school when Irina and I were married. Nor had I ever really loved a woman since Clara; socially I had moved easily in many circles as a contented widower under no compulsion to alter his status. But the idea of having a beautiful and aristocratic lady to preside over my establishments without unduly interfering with my settled ways had intrigued me. And Irina gave me just what I wanted.

  She was at all times the perfect lady. She never had the crudity to articulate a definition of our relationship, which we both understood to be a classic case of symbiosis. She viewed the passing scene of my law practice, my partners, my court victories, as she might have viewed a mildly diverting comedy, and she acted with a charming grace on the rare occasions when I had some real need of her social skills. She was properly grateful for my generosity to her relatives and never overdid her demands. And I think she liked me well enough, when she thought of me, though I never shared the importance to her of the shades of her first husband and son. But then, did she ever share the importance to me of the shade of Clara? I was fair about it. We both were. It was our bond.

  I offer this example of both her essential indifference to the New York scene and her ability on occasion to take advantage of it. She was nobody's fool. When I asked her once what she thought of one of my most brilliant younger partners, who, dining with us, had obviously been intrigued by his lovely hostess, she replied, "He reminds me of a very good coffee blender. It makes excellent coffee. But only coffee. Your partner makes very good law, I have no doubt. But that's all he makes."

  Did she think that of me? At any rate, she never said so. And she had an eye on my young partner, for she later succeeded in marrying him to one of her indigent nieces. And it was a happy marriage, too.

  With Philip, however, she showed something like a real warmth. Perhaps he reminded her of her slain son, one of the lost army of noble youths who, in her fantasy, might have saved Russia from the Red tide. Philip listened sympathetically to her tales of former glory, and she liked him to tell her about some of the more pathetic of his Legal
Aid cases. Neither of them spoke of such matters to me, perhaps in the fear of boring me, yet I experienced something like jealousy over it.

  "I don't quite see what you and Irina have so much in common," I couldn't help observing to my son one day. He had his own apartment, but he had made it a habit to come to Sunday lunch at my house. "I should have thought your political views were about as far apart as views can be."

  "Irina doesn't really have political views, Dad."

  "What about all those serfs? What about sending liberals to the Siberian mines? That's where the Sobieskis would have sent you, my lad."

  "That was another world. It doesn't exist for her now."

  "I sometimes wonder how much ours does."

  Philip was silent, as he often was now when he felt we were approaching a gulf. Had he given me up?

  The Great Depression did not catch me unprepared; I had liquidated many of my stocks while the market was high, and litigation survives every disaster. But the huge numbers of unemployed revived some of Irina's nightmares of the Russian Revolution, and she actually showed some slight interest in our situation.

  "Have you monies, Langdon, invested outside this country?"

  "Very insignificantly. Why do you ask?"

  "Because it has come to seem strange to me that none of my family had the foresight to set up a bank account in London or Paris. I suppose they had too blind a faith in the stability of the czar. So when the storm hit us and we lucky ones got out—if we were the lucky ones—it was only with a few jewels sewn in our coats. My brother would still be driving a taxicab if you, my dear, hadn't come to our rescue."

  "And you think I'd better look to my laurels now? With a bank account abroad? Where?"

  "Well, isn't Argentina pretty sound? Helena Adamowski seems to think so."