“But he’s here, Mrs. Webb,” she told him. “He’s been waiting in the reception room for fifteen minutes. You said you would see nobody.”
“Send him in, for the love of Mike!’”
The moment Cup appeared in the doorway, Webb knew that he had won. He was too old a hand in the art of appearances not to recognize that defiant, sulking half-grin and the furtive glitter of those eyes. As he rose to usher his opponent to a seat, his heart went out to a fighter betrayed as he himself had been.
“Mr. Webb,” Cup began in a wistful, reflective tone, “I’ve come to make one last effort to see if you and I can’t straighten out this sorry mess. I think the time has come for us to rise above partisanship and to consider the real victims of this tragedy: two small, helpless children, who are going to be scarred for life by what has happened already.”
Webb nodded gravely and admiringly. It was exactly the opening which he had planned for his own appeal. “You’re right, Mr. Cup. I was telling my client only last week that the children were the greatest sufferers. I think we should each be prepared to give a little for their sakes.”
“I’m very happy to hear you say that, Mr. Webb. In fact, anticipating that you might take the larger view, I have come armed with a few propositions.”
And then, in half an hour, they proceeded to settle a dispute that had lasted for a year and entailed no less than six separate lawsuits. Webb conceded the custody of the children which Peyton had never really wanted, and Cup reduced his demands for money which the future Mrs. Gwinnett was never going to need. A new divorce action would be entered, and the senior Mrs. Hobart leashed. There remained only the question of fees, and for this discussion Webb and Cup lit cigars and settled back to view each other with now friendly eyes. It was immediately agreed that Peyton would pay both lawyers. The husband, in such cases, always did.
“I’ve been over my time sheets,” Cup said with a sigh, “and even cutting the wretched business to cost, I don’t see how I can do it for less than thirty-five.”
Webb took a long puff of his cigar and closed one eye as he stared at his crystal inkwell. Thirty-five thousand was what he had decided to charge Peyton, exclusive of out-of-state counsel costs, but it was preferable to be able to show him that he was charging less than Georgette’s lawyer. “I presume that doesn’t include the custody suit.”
Cup’s expression betrayed surprise only in that it betrayed nothing. “Oh, of course, not,” he said promptly. “I shall want another seventy-five hundred for that.”
Webb put down his cigar carefully and slowly rose to his feet. “Mr. Cup,” he said as he extended his hand across the desk, “I think we have a deal.”
As they shook hands warmly, they might have been two old veteran soldiers, emerging from opposing trenches, having fought each other long and well, to embrace on the morning of an armistice brought about by politicians behind the lines, an armistice that was, in the bitter opinion of each, a disgrace to both their nations.
A year and a half later Waldron Webb made one of his rare excursions into the countryside to attend the firm outing which was held annually, under the auspices of Clitus Tilney, at the Glenville Beach Club on Long Island’s north shore. Webb always dreaded these outings, as he had never played golf or tennis, hated the water and did not wish to become identified with the small, repulsive, story-swapping group that spent the afternoon in the bar. He was the kind of lawyer who was happy only in his home, in his office or in court, and it was not pleasant to be protected and entertained by an expansive and condescending Tilney, perspiring after eighteen holes on the golf course, who seemed to find the rewards of a successful professional life, as manifested in the gleaming yellow pavilion and red umbrellas of his club, as exhilarating as the work itself. Yes, Tilney, taking his arm for a stroll down the terrace, Tilney, pointing out his eminent fellow members lying about on the sand, Tilney laughing loudly at remarks of Webb that he hadn’t quite heard, might be treating him as a co-consul of the little empire of Towner, Tilney & Webb, but wasn’t it the treatment that the aging and muscular, the still romantic Mark Antony, had meted out to a stout and puffing Lepidus?
“Now there’s a sight that ought to interest you, Waldron,” Tilney said, pausing and waving an arm towards a group of children playing in the sand by what appeared to be two pairs of parents. Under the umbrellas, all in bathing suits, with pails and shovels for the children and cocktails for the adults, they made up a gay and colorful group. On the porch nearby two large grey, black-hooded baby carriages with shining spoked wheels were being rocked by two nurses in white. “Don’t you recognize your old client?”
Webb stared into the group until he made out the familiar boyish features, under the dark suntan and over the unfamiliar brown bare lissome torso, of Peyton Hobart.
“Is that his new wife with him?”
“His new wife?” Tilney tilted his head back and let out his high, mocking laugh. “Bless you, my friend, it’s both his wives. Let me read you the dramatis personae, starting from left to right. It’s a lesson in Long Island mores!” Tilney cleared his throat and proceeded to point boldly from one figure to the next. “Over here, we have two infants, tended by two expensive white-robed presences. They are little Olive Hobart, child of your client and his second spouse, and little Button Gwinnett, named for the ancestral signer, child of Georgette and Tommy. Playing near the carriages are Tommy Gwinnett’s three daughters by his first wife, the two Marsden boys, and the Hobart boy and girl over whose custody you raised such a rumpus. Turning now to the adults, you will observe how peace and concord have returned at last to the shores of Long Island Sound. The four individuals drinking gin in the bright sunlight and laughing the laughter of youth, are, besides your client, the following: his present wife, Olive, his former wife, Georgette, and her present husband, Tommy Gwinnett.”
Webb stared in fascination at that beautiful, promiscuous, near-naked quartet, with their host of beautiful, near-naked children. Who would have believed that a scant eighteen months before they had been engaged in no less than six bitter lawsuits? And now, with children tumbling over each other and over them (children who hardly knew, perhaps, which adult was a parent and which a stepparent), laughing and sipping gin, making jokes, perhaps, of their old days of discord, making jokes—oh, agony to think of!—of their “little men downtown” who had taken their squabbles with such amusing, passionate seriousness, they might have been the foreground in an advertisement of an exotic foreign car, so congenial, so gay, so pearly-toothed, did they all appear.
“Rabbits,” he muttered angrily to his partner as they turned back to the club house. “They’re nothing but rabbits. People like that don’t deserve the time the courts waste over them. They should do their breeding without the sanction of law!”
The Deductible Yacht
THE KIPS always boasted that their blood was the finest in New York. They had managed to restrict it, since the eighteenth century, to the small group of families that had then been considered Manhattan society. The temptation to wade out, as the sand dried, into the endless waves of new fortunes that lapped the city had been sternly resisted. A Kip lady had been denied to a nephew of Mayor Hone in the 1830’s and a Kip gentleman to a Gould heiress a half century later. Even Standard Oil would not do for the Kips, even the House of Morgan. There had been a now legendary Miss Kip, not blessed in looks or fortune, who seated alone at a ball had rejected the proffered introductions of her hostess, saying: “Thank you so much, but I’m perfectly happy sitting here and thinking what everyone in this room would give for one drop of my old Kip blood!” The Kips wanted to be left alone, and their wish had been gratified.
Inevitably, they became too numerous to be supported forever by the bit of old farmland in downtown Manhattan on which a famous office building squatted. Long before the disaster of 1929 “Kip Keep,” the turreted shingle castle of the Beekman Kips in Newport had been razed, and the tall gabled matching Dutch houses on Madison Avenue of the T
yler Kip sons converted to stores. By the middle of our century the male Kips were mostly at work, as lawyers or brokers or insurance salesmen. They still managed to send their children to private schools and to get out of town in the summer, but where were the marks to set them aside from the crowd? Where were the distinguishing features?
These were the questions that disturbed Bayard Kip, who as a tax expert and, at thirty-four, an about-to-be partner in Tower, Tilney & Webb was considered the prodigy of the family. But what was a Bayard Kip who had to help his wife with the dishes and take his children to the park on Sundays? What was a Bayard Kip who had to hire a sitter when he went out in the evening and whose apartment rang with television phrases? Were there not thousands such? Was not this fatal competence in adaptation more extinguishing to a family than any other quality? Bayard might polish and repolish his London shoes and wear waistcoats throughout the hottest summer; he might roll his umbrella until it was as thin as a cane and wear the darkest suits and the darkest ties—it was all no use. The face that looked back at him in the morning from his grandfather’s mahogany-framed shaving mirror had none of the highcheekboned, hooknosed superciliousness of a colonial governor, none of what Bayard’s grandmother, pronouncing it in French, had called race. It was a mild, soft-eyed, square-jawed, straightnosed, blemishless American face. It might have been looking at him from across a soda fountain.
The government agents and auditors with whom he had to work seemed equally unaware that he had any particular claim to distinction. They found him reserved, impassive, even “stuffy,” but his patience with every demand, his quiet reasonableness in argument and his clear, exact mind for figures made him a popular lawyer to deal with. One of the agents, a hard-fisted, cynical Irishman, Tommy Reardon, became almost a friend. Reardon was intrigued by Bayard’s economic philosophy which he liked to describe as somewhat to the right of Louis XIV.
“Does it never occur to you,” he asked Bayard at lunch after they had completed auditing a great building contractor’s return, “that there’s something wrong with a country whose best brains are spent in attacking and defending the shenanigans of an old trickster like Inka Dahduh?”
“You will understand that I must disassociate myself from any such description of a client,” Bayard replied in a cool but unindignant tone.
“You know what Dahduh is! Far better than I. A man who never went to school, much less college. A man whose highest ideal is to give nothing for something! Yet here we are, two well-educated, thinking men with consciences and ideals, utterly absorbed in his shifty little deals. You trying to sweep them under the rug and I to sweep them out!”
“I have swept nothing of Mr. Dahduh’s under the rug,” Bayard insisted.
“All right, leave him out of it. Let’s just say a client. Surely you won’t maintain that all your clients are angels?”
“Let me put it this way,” Bayard said, after a moment of judicious reflection. “I believe that all the returns which I have prepared—or which have been prepared under my supervision—represent an honest disclosure of the pertinent facts.”
“Oh, for Pete’s sake, Kip!” Reardon exclaimed impatiently. “Isn’t it bad enough for you to have to work for these new tycoons without justifying them? All this easy money, these phony deductions, these blown-up expense accounts, these crazy corporate shells—all this slick financing to give the public a shoddy product—why must you defend it? What do you get out of it but a wretched salary, fully taxable, at that? Where are your deductions? You remind me of those ladies’ maids in the French Revolution who followed their mistresses to the scaffold because they were too blind to see that the Jacobins were their real friends!”
“Is that what you plan for us, Tommy? The scaffold?”
“Well, if we could have your head, my friend, Uncle Sam would collect a lot more taxes!”
They laughed and parted, as usual, friends, but Reardon’s comparison to the ladies’ maids rankled deeply in Bayard’s heart. For Inka Dahduh, the son of an Armenian rug peddler who now owned buildings in every part of the city, was to Bayard the incarnation of the destroying spirit that had laid low the poor old shabby, genteel past. Whole blocks of beautiful sober red-faced Federal houses had fallen before his bulldozers; churches and shrines had been sacrificed to make way for his thinly built, highly priced, spare grey cubes. And Inka himself looked like a conquering Tartar, a scimitar-swinging Tamburlaine, smiling at the discomfort of his victims. He was a tall, wide-shouldered, big-stomached, formidable man, with a blue complexion, a hawk nose, glittering black eyes and long thick oiled black hair, who spoke with a rumble and laughed in the sudden, explosive way of one whose temper, however massive, is always at the service of his shrewdness. He lived on top of one of his many buildings in a penthouse constructed of glass and bamboo, in the great bare reception halls of which, painted red and yellow and gold, hung his Pollocks and De Koonings and Klees, and through which sauntered the endlessly eclectic assembly of his guests.
Dahduh, on the other hand, regarded Bayard with the greatest admiration. It gave him especial pleasure to watch this cool young man, cool on the hottest day in the hottest conference, the only person not in shirtsleeves, work out the most tangled problems with the aid of a slide rule and a single sheet of paper in one corner of which his sharp pencil jotted the minimum of figures. “It’s old New York,” Dahduh would announce triumphantly to the partners of his venture. “My little Kip here is a bit of ancient Yankee stock. He can even teach the old Armenian tricks!” Bayard at such moments felt like a captive Athenian scholar in the court of a Macedonian king.
But the most burdensome part of his duties for the builder were social. Dahduh had an old yacht on which he liked to take a motley group of helpless guests for weekend outings in Long Island Sound, and on the Sunday afternoon following the day of his lunch with Reardon, Bayard and his wife were included in one of these. Peggy Kip was a bright-eyed, tense little woman, with a habit of always pursing her lips, and although she did not share her husband’s umbrage at the present obscurity of the Kips, being quite contented with the mild distinction in her little set conveyed by such heirlooms as the Duncan Phyfe horsehair sofa and the Eastman Johnson conversation piece, she had to the fullest the Kip sense that anybody, be he Pope or President, who was in any way “different” was “funny.” And Inka Dahduh was the funniest of all. She made no effort to mix with the other guests, but sat at the long table in the main saloon, turning the pages of the visitors’ log with half-suppressed giggles.
“I suppose I’m being awful,” she whispered to Bayard with perfunctory remorse. “I suppose I should be more respectful.”
It was true, of course, that she was behaving badly and that the wife of any other clerk in Tower, Tilney & Webb would have been up on deck with the host uttering little squeals of admiration over the boat and its fixtures. But Bayard had never asked Peggy to be a good office wife; he would have scorned to do so. He did, however, observe, over the slowly widening gulf between her domestic preoccupations and his long downtown hours, that it never seemed to occur to her that she owed him more.
“If you find the visitors’ log amusing, why shouldn’t you express your amusement?” he asked.
“Doesn’t it amuse you?”
“Ought it to?”
“It’s so vulgar, Bayard! All those passée movie actresses with their florid messages. It’s like an old copy of Movie Mirror!”
“I sometimes think there’s nothing so vulgar as poor gentility,” he said with a small sigh. “But let me look at it. This yacht is supposed to be used for business entertainment.”
“Is that what you call business?” Peggy demanded with a snort, pointing to where Inka was standing on the fantail, the arm of a blonde tucked under his. “If I amused Mr. Dahduh, would you let him deduct me?”
Bayard’s gaze followed her impertinent finger and rested for a long moment on his host. Then he turned with a new interest to the log. In fact, in the ensuing half hour he exa
mined every one of its pages. Although he was not familiar with the names of stage and screen, the exclamatory messages beside the signatures, the poems and limericks in the margin, the caricatures drawn all over, the dirty pictures, made it entirely clear that he was not dealing with an assemblage of brokers or contractors. As he was closing the book he felt a friendly grip on his shoulder, and the rumbly voice from above his head demanded:
“Quite a varied group of friends, isn’t it, Bayard?”
“That’s what I was trying to determine. Is it?”
Inka, however, seemed unconscious of any special meaning in his lawyer’s tone. “You should mingle with the others, you and your pretty wife,” he continued. “You should meet my guests and not just read about them. They may not be in the Social Register, but they can teach you a thing or three. That’s why I keep this yacht. It’s like a desert island, on which we’re stranded. We’re cut off from our roots and all the little props that we depend on. For one afternoon we have to be on our own. We have to rely on our wits and our tongues. We have to amuse. Yes, my dear Bayard, you can learn a lot from a day at sea. It’s an experiment with democracy!”
As their host moved off, waving his big cigar in the air, Bayard followed his broad retreating back with narrowed eyes. Peggy, who never seemed to listen to a thing he said, had a way of noticing his smallest change of expression. “Now, Bayard, you’re not going to get in one of your moods, are you? What do we care what he uses his silly yacht for?”
“I happen to care very much.”
“Oh, dear,” she said apprehensively. “Why couldn’t I keep my mouth shut? What are you going to do now?”
“Do?” Bayard’s tone was detached again. “I’m going to do what our host suggests. I’m going to take a little stroll on deck and meet my fellow passengers. I’m going to rely on my wits and my tongue. I’m going to find out exactly what each and every one of them does for a living! And why they’re here.”
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