Powers of Attorney

by Louis Auchincloss

  His friend Horace Mason did little to encourage him.

  “Have you heard about Standard Trust?”

  “You mean the merger?”

  “No, of course, everyone knows about that. Have you heard who’s going to be counsel to the new bank? Mason, Winthrop & Sears!”

  Jake arranged his features quickly to give Horace the least satisfaction. “I find that a bit difficult to credit.”

  “I had it from the senior partner there,” Horace said loftily.

  “The wish, no doubt, was father to the thought.”

  Horace went out to spread his news among the more credulous, and Jake was left to contemplate the bleak possibility of the firm without its biggest client. Tower, Tilney without Standard Trust! Why, it was like Davis, Polk without Morgan’s! Or Milbank, Tweed without the Chase! He was positively shocked now at the wickedness of Lorelei partners who induced young men to sweat out their young years only to be sucked under the tide of failure in the waterlogged barge of heavy overhead and shrinking fees. But could he be sure? Law firms were very deceptive. There was Mason, Winthrop & Sears, for example, which had been described as “skidding” for a quarter of a century. It was often possible that some old corporate client, a bank or trust company, whether through inertia, nepotism or failure to comprehend the inadequacy of the legal services, would remain faithful through the bad years until the firm, like the human body replacing old tissue with new cells, had substituted young and abler men for the fumbling practitioners of yesteryear.

  Nothing in Jake’s legal training, however, was conducive to mere idle speculation. When there was something to find out, he could be a man of action, and he knew that the only way to make a true count of the firm’s pulse was to make a survey of the correspondence files of the partners. It was a difficult, complicated, even a distasteful task, but Jake knew what he owed to his family, his career and himself. On Saturday the file room was normally free of the big, bony presence of the suspicious and insinuatingly familiar Miss Gibbon, one of those “treasures” of old law firms, and under the more relaxed supervision of her younger assistant, Miss Fenton, invisible behind the spread pages of the Journal-American. Here Jake, seated in a corner protected by a barricade of bound registration statements, went to work, starting with the files of the most junior partner, and working up. As the hours passed, he learned many interesting things. He learned that Mr. Tyler had been in psychoanalysis for two years and that Mr. Todd had employed a detective to watch his wife. He learned that Mr. Rogers was flirting with a corporate client, unbeknownst to his partners, in the hope of becoming its president, and that Mr. Tower had suggested to a rich old aunt that she name him, rather than Clitus Tilney, executor of her will. The income tax returns showed a disproportionately large percentage of the firm’s profits going to the older partners and confirmed Jake’s suspicion of the disintegrating increase of selfish interests and decline of the team spirit so necessary to any large organization. But the clinching discovery came at the very end of his search, in the last letter of the senior partner’s file…

  “What are you doing with Mr. Tilney’s correspondence?” It was the rasping voice of Miss Gibbon herself, unaccountably, improperly, present.

  Jake turned slowly and stared up at her expressionlessly. “I’m not accustomed to being spied on, Miss Gibbon.”

  Her angry darting eyes flickered with momentary doubt. Jake knew that for some reason this gnarled, grey, wide-bottomed, popular old creature had never responded, in the way of the other office women, to his blond, clean looks. There must have been something unwholesome behind the parade of her own fidelity to Tower, Tilney to make her nose so sharp.

  “I wasn’t spying,” she grumbled. “I was looking for Mr. Tilney’s correspondence. Nobody’s supposed to read a partner’s personal files, not even another partner. Did he say you could?”

  “I suggest you ask him that,” Jake said coolly and turned back to resume his study of the file. There was a pause, a breathing and a rustle behind him evocative of her indecision, and at last the sound of retreating heels. His bluff had worked; she would never tell Tilney, and if she did, excuses abounded. The important thing was that the letter now under his eyes, addressed to Mr. Mason, of Mason, Winthrop & Sears, contained the recommendation, in the now “likely contingency” of Mr. Mason’s firm being chosen counsel to the merged banks, that it take over certain associates of Tower, Tilney who were expert in Standard Trust matters. And the list of “experts” so to be saved from the wreck was headed by the name of Barry Schlide! When Jake slapped shut the file and strode down between the long rows of green cabinets to toss it boldly on Miss Gibbon’s desk, he had already decided on his resignation.

  Leila proved surprisingly difficult to convince. In the perverse way of women her enthusiasm for the firm seemed to intensify as his own waned. For the first time in all their discussions of his legal career he had the uneasy sense of her undivided attention.

  “But how do you know that Standard Trust will change its lawyers?” she demanded, cross-legged in green velvet pants as she bent intently over the bowl of peas that she was shelling. “How do you know it’s not all just a rumor?”

  “Because I read about it in Mr. Tilney’s correspondence.”

  “What on earth were you doing reading his correspondence?”

  “He asked me to help him on a personal matter.”

  “Do the partners do that?”

  “Why not? We’re the hired help, that’s all.”

  “What kind of a personal matter?”

  “Oh, just an income tax deduction.”

  “Why didn’t he go to the tax department?”

  There were a dozen ways that he could have foiled her, but he was angered at the obvious distrust in her tone. “All right, I went into his files to find out about the merger. What’s wrong with that?”

  “Jake Platt! You old snoop!”

  Her tone was sharper than her words, and there was a gleam of old suspicions in her frankly staring dark eyes, a note of “So you are that sort, after all.”

  “May I remind you that I have a career to look after?” he asked irritably. “May I remind you that I have a wife and child who depend on it?”

  “Oh, don’t put it off on Jock and me. If you’re going to snoop, snoop for yourself.”

  “Honestly, Leila, it’s high time you came out of dreamland. You can’t expect the partners in Tower, Tilney to come to me and tell me they’re on the skids. Chances are they don’t know it themselves.”

  “Then you ought to tell them!”

  “Are you quite mad?”

  “Why is that mad? Why shouldn’t you go to Mr. Tilney, who’s done so much for you, and tell him frankly about your fears for the firm? Maybe you and he could work out some system to save it.”

  Jake covered his face with his hands and uttered a low groan. “Because that isn’t the way life is,” he was murmuring, but he stopped. What was the use? “Anyway, it’s too late. You can’t arrest that kind of rot once it’s started.”

  “All you can do is leave the sinking ship, is that it?”

  Their eyes met in a stare that was suddenly grim.

  “That’s right.”

  “Does your decision to be a rat mean that I must be a rat’s wife?”

  Jake knew that the satisfactions which they derived from this kind of argument were not worth the damage it did to their relationship. He closed his lips very tightly and nodded his head slowly as he counted to ten. “You must do as you see fit, my dear. I’m only trying to be a good husband and father.”

  The following night he did not come home but worked until dawn at the office, arranging his matters and calculating the time that it would take him to complete each. It was the only way he knew of reorienting his thoughts and emotions after the tumultuous invasion of the irrational as represented by his wife. It seemed a pity that a man could not find even in his home life a chance to relax from the ceaseless hypocrisy which the whole world demanded, but
so it was. Remorselessly, other humans, males and particularly females, required that he should toe every minute, every second even, the line of fatuity that was to them more than an imagined line, that was to them, presumably, a saving granite wall that hemmed out a thrusting jungle of horror. If one had the ill chance to be born a freak or a Mowgli, and to understand the jungle, one had to spend a lifetime persuading one’s fellow monkeys (for what else were they?), despite their screams and chattering, their flung coconuts and scampering up and down the trees, that they weren’t in the wilderness at all, that they were confined instead in a nice, neat, cozy zoo where their cages would be cleaned in the morning and where they would be fed at noon. But it made life a weary business for the freak.

  At half past eight Barry Schlide burst into his room with a red beaming face full of news. “Say, Jake, what do you know? I’ve got the hot dope on the Standard-Commerce merger!” He paused as he took in Jake’s unshaven and haggard appearance and whistled. “Hey, haven’t you been home?” When Jake simply shrugged impatiently he went back to his news. “You want to hear the hot dope?”

  “You mean about Mason, Winthrop representing them?”

  “Mason, Winthrop, my eye!” Barry cried in triumph. “Do you think old Clitus was going to let them get away with that? Not on your life, kid. This is old Tilney’s finest hour. Tower, Tilney will be retained as counsel to the new Standard Bank of Commerce.”

  Jake’s stare was now all that even Barry could have wished. “How do you know?”

  “Oh, a tiny, tiny bird,” Barry responded with his widest grin. “A tiny bird called Clitus Tilney.”

  “He told you?”

  “None other.”

  “But why? What have you to do with it, unless…” Jake stopped. Very definitely, he could not endure to be told of Barry’s partnership by Barry.

  “Unless, exactly,” Barry concluded for him. “Unless I have a place in the merger. Which it so happens that Yours Truly does.” Barry puffed out his chest and put one hand over his heart and the other in his hip pocket in what was supposed to be a Napoleonic stance. “You have the privilege of seeing before you the new head of the pension trust department of the Standard Bank of Commerce!”

  Jake rose shakily to take the now proffered hand. “You mean you’re leaving us? Well, that’s terrific, old man, and it’s one hell of a fine job, but what about here?” He gripped Barry’s shoulder in a sudden surge of friendly feelings.

  “Here? What do you mean, here?”

  “I mean your chances of being a partner.”

  Barry’s smile exploded into one of his happy, boisterous laughs. “Are you kidding? Mrs. Schlide’s little boy from Queens amid all the Towers and Tilneys? Do I look like the Social Register type?”

  “As a matter of fact, only five of the partners are in the Social Register.”

  “Oh, only five?” Barry’s laugh might have been as good-natured as ever, but the hint of mockery in his eyes showed that he had noted the depth of information which Jake had allowed himself to uncover. “Well, I’m betting on you to make it six!”

  “I’m not in the Social Register.”

  “You will be, old boy, don’t worry. And I’ll be rooting for you all the way!”

  “But Barry,” Jake protested, in bewilderment, “if you felt that way about the firm, why did you come here in the first place?”

  “For the resale, my friend, for the resale. And didn’t it work?”

  An hour and a seeming lifetime later, when Jake had received the long-awaited, the ceased-to-be anticipated, the altogether incredible summons to Clitus Tilney’s office, after the usual banter about his exhausted appearance, the usual orders to go home immediately to shave, to rest, to forget work, after the offer, premised with sudden seriousness and contracted brow on the expansion that would be required by the new legal work resulting from the merger, the offer that was simply what one had lived for—the offer that in its very making, carried the germ, already recognizable, of a lifetime of anticlimax—the offer to become a partner in Tower, Tilney & Webb, Jake, sitting back weakly in his chair and inhaling a cigarette that was dizzying at this time before sleep or food, heard himself asking: “And what, sir, if I may ask, about Barry?”

  “Barry? Barry Schlide? Well, I guess we needn’t worry about Barry. I’ve fixed him up with a fine job in the new bank.”

  “So he told me. But did he have no chance here?”

  “Barry?” Tilney seemed to multiply his interrogation infinitely by his third query of the name, an interrogation that made him and Jake seem like two figures scampering down the long echoing corridor of all that had to be taken for granted, away from the poor capering clownish outline, dimmer and dimmer as they left it behind, of Barry Schlide. “Barry’s all very well, of course—a first class tax mind—but Barry’s not for us. He just isn’t the type. Surely, Jake, you know that as well as I.”

  “Because he didn’t go to Harvard?”

  “Harvard? What in the deuce does Harvard have to do with it?” Tilney demanded impatiently, as if distressed to find, in the first minutes of a new relationship which was supposed to ease communication, that such things had still to be explained. “Schlide doesn’t have the personality for our kind of firm. Can you see what would happen if he pulled one of those corny jokes on old Miss Johanna Shepard? Or if he talked to the crowd at East Coast Railways about Mrs. Schlide’s little boy Barry? You know the facts of life, Jake.”

  “It seems a pity. He means so well.”

  “Well, did you and I make the world? Now stop worrying about Barry Schlide and get yourself home and shaved and rested and take that pretty wife of yours out to dinner tonight and tell her your good news over a bottle of champagne. Okay?”

  Jake, weary as he was, walked all the way up to Stuyvesant Town, and it seemed to him that the gleam of sunlight on the sapphire blue of the East River was as cold as the twinkle in the senior partner’s eye.

  Power of Bequest

  RUTHERFORD TOWER, although a partner, was not the Tower of Tower, Tilney & Webb. It sometimes seemed to him that the better part of his life went into explaining this fact or at least into anticipating the humiliation of having it explained by others. The Tower had been his late Uncle Reginald, the famous surrogate and leader of the New York bar, and the one substantial hope in Rutherford’s legal career. For Rutherford, despite an almost morbid fear of clerks and courts, and a tendency to hide away from the actual clients behind their wills and estates, had even managed to slip into a junior partnership before Uncle Reginald, in his abrupt, downtown fashion, died at his desk. But it was as far as Rutherford seemed likely to go. There was nothing in the least avuncular about Uncle Reginald’s successor, Clitus Tilney. A large, violent, self-made man, Tilney had a chip on his shoulder about families like the Towers and a disconcerting habit of checking the firm’s books to see if Rutherford’s “Social Register practice,” as he slightingly called it, paid off. The junior Tower, he would remark to the cashier after each such inspection, had evidently been made a partner for only three reasons: because of his name, because of his relatives, and because he was there.

  And, of course, Tilney was right. He was always right. Rutherford’s practice didn’t pay off. The Tower cousins, it was true, were in and out of his office all day, as were the Hallecks, the Rutherfords, the Tremaines, and all the other interconnecting links of his widespread family, but they expected, every last grabbing one of them, no more than a nominal bill. Aunt Mildred, Uncle Reginald’s widow, was the worst of all, an opinionated and litigious lady who professed to care not for the money but for the principle of things and was forever embroiled with landlords, travel agencies, and shops. However hard her nephew worked for her, he could never feel more than a substitute. It was Clitus Tilney alone whose advice she respected. Rutherford sometimes wondered, running his long nervous fingers over his pale brow and through his prematurely grey hair, if there was any quality more respected by the timid remnants of an older New York society,
even by the flattest-heeled and most velvet-gowned old maid, than naked aggression. What use did they really have for anyone whom they had known, like Rutherford, from his childhood? He was “one of us,” wasn’t he—too soft for a modern world?

  The final blow came when Aunt Margaretta Halleck, the only Tower who had married what Clitus Tilney called “real money,” and for whom Rutherford had drawn some dozen wills without fee, died leaving her affairs, including the management of her estate, in the hands of an uptown practitioner who had persuaded her that Wall Street lawyers were a pack of wolves. The next morning, when Rutherford happened to meet the senior partner in the subway, Tilney clapped a heavy hand on his shrinking shoulder.

  “Tell me, Rutherford,” he boomed over the roar of the train. “Have you ever thought of turning yourself into a securities lawyer? We could use another hand on this Smilax deal.”

  “Well, it’s not a field I know much about,” Rutherford said miserably.

  “But, man, you’re not forty yet! You can learn. Quite frankly, this Halleck fiasco is the last straw. I’m not saying it’s anyone’s fault, but the family business isn’t carrying its share of the load. Think it over.”

  Rutherford sat later in his office, staring out the window at a dark brick wall six feet away, and thought gloomily of working night and day on one of Tilney’s securities “teams,” with bright, intolerant younger men who had been on the Harvard Law Review. The telephone rang, startling him. He picked it up. “What is it?” he snapped.

  It was the receptionist. “There’s a Colonel Hubert here,” she said. “He wants to see Mr. Tower. Do you know him, or shall I see if Mr. Tilney can see him?”

  It was not unusual for prospective clients to ask for “Mr. Tower,” assuming that they were asking for the senior partner. Rutherford, however, was too jostled to answer with his usual self-depreciation. “If I were the receptionist,” he said with an edge to his voice, “and somebody asked for Mr. Tower, I think I’d send him to Mr. Tower. But then, I suppose, I have a simple mind.”