The Scarlet Letters

by Louis Auchincloss

  “I don’t think Mrs. Jessup gives a damn how it may look or what people will say,” Harry retorted at last. “She won’t take anything for herself. So draft me up something about the children, the usual weekend and summer provisions—take the Bennett agreement for a model—and leave blank the spaces for child support payments, and I’ll go over it with her.”

  When Owens had left, Miss Peltz called him to tell him that Mrs. Jessup herself had arrived and was waiting to see him. As soon as Vinnie was seated at his desk before him, and the door reclosed, he told her of Owens’s objection.

  “It’s just what I warned you about, Vinnie. It won’t look well for you to skip the alimony. If you don’t want it yourself, why not take it and put it in trust for the children?”

  “Never!” she exclaimed, in a spurt of sudden temper. “Take money from poor Rod? After what you and I have been doing! Why, it would be shameless!”

  “But, Vinnie—”

  “No, Harry, no! I’m speaking to my lawyer now, not my lover, and I expect to be obeyed. Unless you want me to get another. Lawyer, I mean.”

  There was something distinctly different about Vinnie that morning. Or perhaps something reminiscent of how she had been before their intimate relations. As his mistress she had appeared to entertain for him an almost cowering devotion, totally unlike the rather mocking friendliness that had preceded it. He had privately relished the supposition that he had given her the thrill and satisfaction that she had not found with her less imaginative spouse. Whatever it was, however, it was now in eclipse. The old Lavinia was more than apparent in her tone.

  She took his silence as assent to her alimony decision, and went on: “There’s something else it behooves you to know, Harry. Certainly as my lawyer, anyway. Something I’ve just found out myself.”

  Harry eyed her intently. Was she going to tell him she didn’t love him? “Something about yourself?”

  “Oh, very much about myself. I’m pregnant.”

  “Vinnie!” He jumped to his feet. Then, as quickly, he reseated himself. “But that’s wonderful news!”

  Her stare was blank. “Why wonderful?”

  His brain seemed to whirl. One of his doubts about marriage was whether she could have a child; none had followed the birth of her younger daughter. He hadn’t been sure how much he really wanted one, but now he knew! He wanted one very much! “Because it will be our child, darling, yours and mine. We’ll marry and love it and bring it up together … Oh, it will all be fine!”

  “Aren’t you taking a lot of things for granted? Me, to begin with. And secondly, the ‘ourness’ of the child?”

  “You mean it’s not ours?”

  “Oh, it’s mine, all right. But there may be a question if it’s yours. I had not discontinued sexual relations with Rod. And what he and I did together was rather more child producing than some of the things you and I did.”

  Could a fetus in a womb make two women out of one? Harry felt chilled before this new Vinnie. But not jealous. Not, oddly enough, the least jealous.

  “You never told me you were still sleeping with Rod.”

  “Why should I have? It was my business, and my business alone, how best to handle a husband in such a situation. I didn’t want to deny him anything that might arouse his suspicions. And we didn’t take any precautions, any more than you and I did, believing, as I did, what the doctor told me after my second daughter was born. Well, he was wrong. Obviously, I could have another child.”

  Harry was almost surprised himself at his now impetuous offer. “But Rod’s child or mine, I’ll be his father if you’ll marry me!”

  “His? You assume it will be a boy?”

  “I do.”

  “Why, for God’s sake?”

  “Because you’re like Lady Macbeth today. ‘Bring forth men children only!’”

  “But she hadn’t already produced two daughters.”

  “By Rod!”

  “I see. And not by you.” She nodded slowly. “Well, the news seems to have done strange things to you. And I will admit I think you’re behaving rather well. So how about this. We’ll go ahead with the divorce as planned. Rod seems bent on that. And as for you and me, we’ll wait until the child is born. If it’s yours I’ll marry you.”

  He gaped. “But how will you know?”

  “Oh, I’ll know. Mothers always do.”

  “That’s an old wives’ tale, Vinnie!”

  “Well, then, I’m an old wife.”

  WHEN JACK OWENS reported to Rod Jessup, as Harry supposed they had to, that Vinnie was pregnant, Rod at once waived all rights to the unborn infant. This amounted to a voucher that the child was none of his, and Harry impressed upon Owens the importance of not revealing it to anyone in the firm, particularly to Ambrose Vollard. He sought, unsuccessfully he could only suppose, to convince the young man that Jessup’s attitude betrayed an hysterical jealousy by the need to excuse his own infidelity.

  Five months later Vinnie gave birth to a fine healthy son.

  Almost at the same time, the Boston great-aunt died, and the Waldo trust should have terminated. But it didn’t. Harry had the mortification of reading in a Boston journal that Waldo had used as a measure the old common-law maximum limitation of two lives in being plus twenty-one years. The two lives were no longer in being, but the period in gross of a legal majority was just beginning! For all his bitterness Harry still found occasion for an ironic guffaw at his own incapacity. How could he have forgotten a limitation that he had learned in his first year at law school?

  The first evening that he was allowed to call upon Vinnie, now Mrs. Vollard Jessup as her divorce caused her to be named, she led him into the baby’s room and asked the nurse to leave them. Together they looked down at the bawling child.

  “You see he wants a father,” Vinnie announced with a smile. “And I have every intention of giving him one.”

  “But whom?”

  “You’re the lucky man.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Look at him, silly.”

  Indeed, the cleft chin and the slight hook of the nose were models of Harry’s own. But, even more than that, he felt a sudden conviction that she was right, and he was seized by a totally novel exaltation.

  “He’s mine!” he cried.

  She laughed. “And mine, too, I hope.”

  “Yes, you’ll have to marry me now!”

  “Just for his sake?”

  “Isn’t that enough?”

  She looked away with a slight shrug. “I guess it will have to be.”

  He did not turn to her. His eyes were fixed on the child, who had stopped crying and seemed to be staring at him. “It’s all right, sonny,” his lips silently articulated. “I’ll give you the world.” It even crossed his mind that the boy would have just attained his majority when his mother would come into her share of the Waldo trust. The child’s father would see to it that she made a proper settlement on the young man.

  9

  THE NEXT FIVE YEARS marked the rise to local glory of Harry Hammersly. Married to Lavinia and son-in-law of the senior partner, he took over Rod Jessup’s old position of heir apparent, at least in the eyes of the younger partners, now a majority. Heir presumptive, in Harry’s own private opinion, might have been the more accurate term. For Ambrose bore nothing like the same affection for this second son-in-law that he had borne for the first. It was true that he respected Harry’s undoubted legal abilities, and found him particularly valuable in taking off his burdened shoulders some of the trickier problems of management. But he could never feel that Harry was really with him in what he deemed the most vital function of his own professional life: the tight welding together of a group of profound and idealistic legal minds in a unit of mutual respect and affection. He more than suspected that Harry’s eye was fastened, perhaps to the exclusion of other considerations, on the annual figure of the firm’s net profits.

  And he was right. Harry read the future very differently from the way his w
ife’s father read it. He saw size as the name of the future game, and the greatest prizes going to the biggest firms. He understood perfectly that Vollard Kaye was considered a jewel case among the firms representing major corporations and that its list of clients was the envy of downtown, but he also saw that by expanding its business into the areas of celebrity divorces, family feuds in Gotham, stockholders’ strike suits, deadly proxy battles, medical malpractice and other fields of legal combat openly sniffed at by the ethically snobbish Ambrose, he could double the size of the firm and more than double its net profits. He was already having quiet lunches with Morris Applebaum, of Applebaum, Levy & Knox, who enjoyed a brilliant practice in all the areas shunned by Vollard Kaye, but who lacked a strong corporate department. A merger with them, in Harry’s eyes, would be a merger made in heaven, though it was only too clear that in Ambrose’s far from silent view, it would be made in the other place.

  For such a union would involve the taking in of some twenty-five new partners and placing them above Vollard Kaye associates who had been led to believe that they had no rivals in ascending the firm ladder other than those hired originally out of law school like themselves. The joined firms would constitute a unit markedly different from the present Vollard Kaye, for Ambrose’s particular variety of esprit de corps would be bound to be lost in sheer numbers and with partners not trained in his philosophy. Harry recognized that Vollard, Applebaum & Hammersly (for his imagination had already placed his name in the new firm) would have lost the unique reputation its predecessor now enjoyed in the legal world, but he was sure that this loss would be compensated, at least in the eyes of the younger partners, by a “gross” that would put it among the first firms in the nation!

  Nor did he have any serious qualms about working in a kind of underground against his father-in-law’s principles. He saw the future as ineluctable and Ambrose’s idealistic concept of a law firm as a quaint relic of a picturesque but disappearing past. To oppose the big black curling breakers of the coming sea was as futile and even ludicrous as leading knights of the round table into the surging foam. Their very armor would pull them down. Sad, but was it Harry’s fault if Ambrose chose the role of Don Quixote? While he Harry, the supreme surfer, would slide to glory on the crest of the beetling wave?

  And he had more now than just himself to think about. He had his son, or “stepson” as the world was asked to believe, young Ambrose Jessup, a fine, healthy little lad, almost comically resembling him, who had the sense already to show a marked preference for his jovial, gift-bearing, fun-sharing “stepfather” over his more remote and often preoccupied mother. Young Ambrose might ultimately rise to take the place of his maternal grandfather and namesake in the family firm (a firm to which his “stepfather” would have ultimately made the greater contribution), but if the boy chose another career, well, Harry would see that he had the best start in that!

  One thing that seemed to bode well for Harry’s projected merger was a marked decline in old Ambrose’s mental and physical health. He had always been subject to periodic spells of depression, but ever since Rod Jessup had quit the firm, they had become more frequent and more prolonged. The staff had gradually fallen into the habit of referring all administrative questions to Harry. Vacuums are soon filled. And one of such questions was that of moving the firm from its old quarters, which it had long occupied in a superannuated building on Wall Street, to a new gleaming glass cube with a breathtaking view of the harbor. There was also plenty of available space in the structure to accommodate the Applebaum firm should the merger ever be effected.

  Ambrose, reluctantly accompanying his son-in-law on an inspection tour of the proposed site, grumbled a bit as they traversed the empty white corridors and empty white chambers. “It’s all very swell, of course, Harry. A bit too swell, if you ask me, which I’m not entirely sure you’re planning to. I can never forget how, in my uncle’s old offices, he used to remind people, if they couldn’t find a document in the safe, to look underneath it, for there was a hole in its bottom. That was the kind of relaxed, genteel atmosphere I cherished! Can’t imagine it happening here.”

  Harry smiled in a show of sympathy. He had heard the story many times before. They were nearing the end of their visit, and he now guided his senior’s footsteps to a vast corner office whose four large windows framed the dramatic panorama of Governor’s Island and the Statue of Liberty.

  “And for what monarch will this be the throne room?” Ambrose growled.

  “Need you ask, sir?”

  The older man was touched, in spite of himself. Even he could be dazzled. He gave Harry a little cuff on the shoulder.

  “Get thee behind me, Satan!”

  Vinnie had watched the rising tension between her father and husband with apprehension. She had not lost her high post in the paternal affections, but she was no longer the intimate confidante she had once been. Ambrose seemed to be retiring farther and further into himself. And it was she who needed him now, as he had once needed her. Being Harry’s wife, she found, was a very different thing from being his mistress.

  Was it marriage that had changed Harry? Or paternity? Or simply the elimination of Rod between himself and his goal in the firm? In any case, he was a much more serious person. Harry had still his old biting and sarcastic humor, but it was tempered now with a new habit of mild frowns, and his old shrill laugh had been muted to a rather smug chuckle. He had become somehow more focused, but on what she was not sure, except that it was certainly not his wife.

  They had at last one of those discussions that suddenly erupt into irate recognitions of differences that each has known were long smoldering in the other.

  “I wish you’d go a little easier on Dad,” she had begun and then faltered, for he had looked immediately and sharply up. “I mean about this new office and all. You know how he hates changes. But time will maybe do a lot, if you’ll just be patient.”

  “Time is something we don’t have an infinite amount of, my dear. Its very name implies it. And markets have to be taken advantage of. Real estate markets, especially.”

  “But you don’t want to hurt him, do you?”

  “I don’t want to, of course not. But men who stand pat before the juggernaut of the future must expect to be pushed aside.”

  “My father, Harry, is not a man to be pushed aside.”

  “Then let him stand gracefully out of the way.”

  This angered her. “You seem to have this fixed idea that the future belongs to you. I don’t see any reason for such pessimism. Why shouldn’t it belong equally well to Daddy? He’s certainly done more than you have to make the present what it is.”

  “You will oblige me, Lavinia, by not talking about things you know nothing about.”

  “Why should I give a damn about obliging you?” Vinnie’s voice was rising. “And I do know what I’m talking about! I’m talking about human decency and plain ordinary gratitude!”

  “How does gratitude come into it?”

  “How can you ask? Anyway, I’ll tell you! Gratitude for all my father has done for you. He has simply made you, and you know it. Yes, he and I, too. Where the hell do you think Harry Hammersly would be without the two of us?”

  “Just about where he is today,” Harry responded coolly. “You don’t understand these things. You never have, and I daresay you never will. You were raised to worship your father as a god. Well, he’s still a mortal. He’s been a clever lawyer who’s constructed a highly competent firm—for its day. But that day is passing. He knows it, but he won’t face it. That’s why he’s fortunate to have me to do it for him. In another firm he might, like Akele in The Jungle Book, have to fight a successor wolf to the death. With me, instead of a torn throat, he can look forward to a dignified and respected retirement.”

  Vinnie gazed at him, almost now in fear. “All I was suggesting was that you might go a bit slower with him,” she muttered.

  “I shall proceed at my own speed,” was his inexorable reply. “The pac
e will be dictated by events and certainly not by any undue sentimentality. And while we’re on the subject of your father there is something that I want you to take up with him. Something that I’ve given a lot of thought to. And it’s something of which you may be a better proponent than I.”

  “And that is?”

  “Young Ambrose is now five and has not been baptized. I want it done, and I want his name changed to Ambrose Hammersly.”

  “Oh no! What will people say?”

  “I don’t give a hoot in hell what people say. No doubt, some of them have said it already. I want my child to bear my name. I more than want it. I insist on it!”

  “But Daddy has always assumed he’s Rod’s child! What difference does a name make? A stepson is just as good as a son, particularly when Rod never even sees the child. For heaven’s sake, Harry, leave well enough alone!”

  “What’s the big deal? Why all the fuss?”

  “Because if Daddy ever suspects that it wasn’t his dear Rod that caused the big stink but actually his darling daughter, he’ll have a fit!”

  “But you wouldn’t have to tell him the truth.”

  “He can put two and two together. No, I can’t do it. I can’t be the one to tell him he threw his adored protégé out of the firm for something he hadn’t done.”

  “What do you mean, hadn’t done? Do you think he and Lila Fisk were playing tiddlywinks?”

  “Hadn’t done what Daddy couldn’t forgive: being unfaithful to me. Lila Fisk was nothing, and you know it.”

  “Very well. If you won’t go to your father, I will.”

  “But you won’t tell him?”

  “About us? I shall simply tell him that I cannot undertake the raising of his grandson unless the boy bears my name.”