For a moment, Rutherford sat utterly still. “Where did he die?” he asked.
“In some lawyer’s office in Miami. So convenient, I should imagine. They probably had all his papers ready. Why, Rutherford, where are you going?”
He didn’t trust himself to wait, and hurried out. In the street, he bought copies of all the newspapers and went to a Central Park bench to read them. There was little more in any of the obituaries than the headlines: “Former Army Officer Stricken” or “Husband of Mrs. J. L. Tyson Succumbs.” He could find nothing else about the Miami lawyer. After all, he reasoned desperately as he got up and walked through the Mall, wasn’t it only natural for the Colonel to have Florida counsel? Didn’t he spend part of the year there? But, for all his arguments, it was almost lunchtime before he gathered courage to call his office. His secretary, however, had to report only that Aunt Mildred Tower had called twice and wanted him to call back.
“Tell her I’m tied up,” he said irritably. “Tell her I’ve gone to the partners’ lunch.”
For, indeed, it was Monday, the day of their weekly lunch. When he got to the private room of the Down Town where they met, he found some twenty of them at the table, listening to Clitus Tilney. Rutherford assumed, as he slipped into a chair at the lower end of the table, that the senior partner was telling one of his usual stories to illustrate the greatness of Clitus and the confounding of his rivals. But this story, as he listened to it with a growing void in his stomach, appeared to be something else.
“No, it’s true, I’m not exaggerating,” Tilney was saying, with a rumbling laugh. “There are twenty-five wills that they know of already, and they’re not all in by a long shot. Sam Kennecott, at Standard Trust, told me it was a mania with the old boy. And the killing thing is, they’re all the same. Except for one that has forty-five pages of specific bequests, they all set up some crazy foundation under the control of—guess who—the little shyster who drew the will! Sam says you’ve never seen such an accumulation of greed in your life! In my opinion, they ought to be disbarred, the lot of them, for taking advantage of the poor old dodo. Except the joke’s on them—that’s the beauty of it!”
Rutherford did not have to ask one of his neighbors the name of the deceased, but, feeling dazed, he did. The neighbor told him.
“Did any of the big firms get hooked?” someone asked.
“Good Lord, we have some ethics, I hope!” Tilney answered. “Though there’s a rumor that one did. Harrison & Lambert, someone said. Wouldn’t it be wonderful?” Tilney’s large jowls positively shook with pleasure. “What wouldn’t I give to see old Cy Lambert caught like a monkey with his fist in the bottle!”
Rutherford spoke up suddenly. His voice was so high that everyone turned and looked at him. “But what about the man with the last will?” he called down the table to Mr. Tilney. “Why is it a joke on him?”
“You mean the man in Miami?” Tilney said, flashing at Rutherford the fixed smile of his dislike. “Because the old guy didn’t have that sort of money. Not foundation money. The big stuff was all in trust, of course, and goes to the Tysons, where it should go.”
Rutherford concentrated on eating a single course. It would look odd, after his interruption, to leave at once. When he had emptied his plate, he wiped his mouth carefully, excused himself to his neighbors, and walked slowly from the room.
Back at the office, however, he almost dashed to Baitsell’s room. Closing the door behind him, he faced the startled young man with wild eyes. “Look, Baitsell, about that will of Colonel Hubert’s—you’remember.” Baitsell nodded quickly. “Well, he died, you see.”
“Yes, sir. I read about it.”
“Apparently, he’s written some subsequent wills. I think we’d better do nothing about filing ours for the time being. And if I were you I wouldn’t mention this around the office. It might—”
“But it’s already filed, sir!”
“It’s what?”
“Yes, sir. I filed it.”
“How could you?” Rutherford’s voice was almost a scream. “You haven’t had time to prepare a petition, let alone get it signed!”
“Oh, I don’t mean that I filed it for probate, Mr. Tower. I mean I filed it for safekeeping in the Surrogate’s Court. Before he died. The same day he signed it.”
Rutherford, looking into the young man’s clear, honest eyes, knew now that he faced the unwitting agent of his own devil. “Why did you do that?” he asked in a low, almost curious tone. “We never do that with wills. We keep them in our vault.”
“Oh, I know that, sir,” Baitsell answered proudly. “But you told me you didn’t know the relatives. I thought if the old gentleman died and you didn’t hear about it at once, they might rush in with another will. Now they’ll find ours sitting up there in the courthouse, staring them right in the face. Yes, sir, Mr. Tower, you’ll have to be given notice of every will that’s offered. Public notice!”
Rutherford looked at the triumphant young man for a moment and then returned without a word to his own office. There he leaned against Uncle Reginald’s safe and thought in a stunned, stupid way of old Cy Lambert laughing, even shouting, at Clitus Tilney. Then he shook his head. It was too much—too much to take in. He wondered, in a sudden new mood of detachment, if it wasn’t rather distinguished to be hounded so personally by the furies. Orestes. Orestes Rutherford Tower. His telephone rang.
“Rutherford? Is it you?” a voice asked.
“Yes, Aunt Mildred,” he said quiedy.
“Well, I’m glad to get you at last. I don’t know what your uncle would have said about the hours young lawyers keep today. And people talk about the pressure of modern life! Talk is all it is. But look, Rutherford. That blackguard of a landlord of mine is acting up again. He now claims that my apartment lease doesn’t include an extra maid’s room in the basement. I want you to come right up and talk to him. This afternoon. You can, can’t you?”
“Yes, Aunt Mildred,” he said again. “I’m practically on my way.”
THE MAVERICKS
1962
1
HARRY REILLEY occupied a peculiar status among the associates of Tower, Tilney & Webb. He had not been netted by the hiring committee in its annual Christmas canvas of the editors of the Harvard, Yale and Columbia law reviews. He was thirty-two and clerking for a small firm of real estate lawyers in Brooklyn when Clitus Tilney had decided to bolster Tower, Tilney’s small department in that field by hiring a young man, already trained, from the outside. Harry understood that he was being employed as a specialist with little chance of ultimate partnership, and he had not minded until he had discovered the tight little social hierarchy into which the firm was organized. Then he decided that working in his status was like climbing the stairs in a department store while alongside one an escalator carried the other customers smoothly and rapidly to the landing.
The real estate department of Tower, Tilney had for years been run by an old associate, Llewellyn Buck, a dry, scholarly gentleman who spent most of his time studying Plantaganet law reporters through thick glasses and who was referred to about the office, with a mild and affectionate contempt, as one who had made nothing of a brilliant start.
“Real property, my dear Reilley, was the golden field of the common law,” he had told Harry at the beginning. “Everything else grew out of it. That’s why everything else is warped, and only the law of conveyances is pure. Stay with purity, my boy. Also, it’s a wonderful field in which to study your fellow mortals. There’s something about a deed or a lease that brings out the meanest and the pettiest in them. I’ve seen a man lose a ten-million-dollar corner property over a difference of opinion about the reading of an oil meter!”
Harry cared little for legal philosophy and less for the opportunity to observe his clients at their less becoming moments, but he liked the salary and stuck to the job. He was used to the small print of deeds and mortgages and was not bothered by detail; his mind, like his body, was tough. He was a big man wit
h big shoulders, and he walked in a stiff, blocky fashion that was yet consistent with a fine muscular coordination. He had a large round head and a bull neck, thick blond hair that he wore in a crew cut and small, grayish-blue eyes with a habitual expression of reserve that bordered on suspicion. His nose was straight and wide, his jaw square, and the slanting lines of his unexpectedly delicate upper lip were almost parallel to his cheekbones. Harry was handsome with the handsomeness of a hundred-and-ninety-pound Irishman in the prime of life, but the danger of overweight already hung about him.
He would have got on well enough with the other clerks had he been less sensitive about real or imagined condescension. When Bart French, Tilney’s son-in-law, the rich young man who worked harder than all the others simply because he was rich, paraded down the corridor to go out to lunch, followed by the little group with which he was working on a corporate indenture, and paused at the door of Harry’s office to ask cheerily: “Care to join us—” Harry would wonder if he was not performing an act of charity to the poor slave in real estate. But he would join them and listen, bored, while they discussed in tedious detail the problems of their current indenture until Bart, towards the end of the meal, would turn to him with a perfunctory show of interest and ask in that same maddening, cheery tone: “What’s new in the metes and bounds department? Have you caught any covenants running with the land?”
Harry had been a prickly soul since the age of fourteen when his father, a seemingly successful Brooklyn building contractor, had gone to jail for looting his company. Harry, the youngest of seven, had been the one to feel it most keenly and, in the ensuing years of retrenchment and hardship, had been his mother’s primary consolation. After his father had been released, and when he had taken to whiskey and selfpity, Harry had been passionately and articulately bitter in his resentment of him. But fathers like Angus Reilley always win in the end, and his death of cancer in Harry’s freshman year at Fordham had so crushed the latter with remorse that he had seemed doomed for a time to the paternal alcoholic course. Indeed, his older brothers and sisters, including Joseph, the priest, had gloomily prognosticated that Harry would go to the dogs, but Harry seemed to have a stabilizer built into his character which, when he tipped too close to the fatal angle, suddenly, if with a great deal of churning and throbbing, succeeded in righting the lurching vessel. He had finished Fordham and Fordham law in the first third of his classes; he had fought as a marine in Korea and been decorated, and he had supported himself creditably in the law ever since. It was a disappointment to his mother that he preferred a room in Manhattan to the family home and a dissolute bachelor existence to the safer joys of early matrimony, but when he came to the Reilleys’ Sunday lunch he always looked hearty and well, and he was charming with all the little nephews and nieces. The family had to concede that when Harry wanted to put his best foot forward, he had a very good foot to offer.
In Tower, Tilney, however, this foot was seen more by the staff than by the lawyers. Harry blandly ignored the elaborate etiquette laid down by the late Judge Tower. He called the stenographers by their first names and went out to lunch with the men in the accounting department. He maintained an easy, joking, mock-flirtatious relationship with the older women—Mrs. Grimshawe, as head of stenographic, Mrs. Lane, the librarian, and Miss Gibbon, the chief file clerk—as a result of which he got as good service as Clitus Tilney himself. In fact, Mrs. Grimshawe, “Lois” as he impudently called her, had been known to leave her desk on the little dais from which she supervised her department, grab a pencil and pad from one of her girls and go to Mr. Reilley’s office to take dictation herself!
Among the law clerks his only two friends were the two whom he considered, like himself, to be mavericks: Lee Ozite, the managing clerk, who handled the court calendars and arranged for the service of papers, and Doris Marsh, the single woman lawyer in the office. Doris’s interest in Harry was immediate and lively, aroused by nothing greater than his merely civil appreciation of herself as a woman. To the other clerks she might as well have been neuter, a tall, pale, tense, awkwardly moving figure of near thirty in a plain brown suit, distastefully associated with taxes, whose black hair was lightly flaked with a premature gray. But Harry did not, like many working men, relegate sex to nonworking hours. A woman to him was always a woman, and, without finding Doris particularly his type, he could perfectly see that her skin, if chalky, was nonetheless smooth and soft, her breasts full and fine and that, without the glasses and the nervous smile, her face might reveal the firm, rounded lines of a Greek statue. Harry could picture Doris sitting on a rock naked, looking out to sea, her hair blown in the wind, and he deplored the fate which had confined her to a city desk.
The first time they lunched together, he discovered that she was a great talker. She drank a martini before her meal and a glass of ale with it and complained at length of the difficulties of being a woman lawyer in Tower, Tilney. She gave instances of discrimination in the tax department: of how she was paid less than associates who had come in after her and not asked to the office outings at the Glenville Beach Club. What just saved her from being a bore was the dry accuracy of her observation and her evident sense of the foolishness of the whole show.
“Now, don’t ask me why I don’t get another job,” she concluded, taking off her glasses and gazing at him with a stare of bland seriousness. “It would be very ungentlemanly because I wouldn’t have a thing to say. Let’s put it that I have a persecution complex.”
“I thought perhaps you hoped to marry one of the partners.”
“Which?”
“Why not Madison? He’s single, isn’t he?”
“That he is.” She maintained all her air of gravity. “He might be just mean enough to do it to save the pittance he now pays me.”
“And think of the income tax deduction you’d bring him! For a man in his bracket that might even make up for a wife who reads herself to sleep with the Revenue Code.”
Doris startled him by throwing back her head and uttering a long, rather wild laugh. But she cut it off with equal abruptness. “I crave you, Harry Reilley. You’re human. One of the few people in the whole damn shop who is. Do you realize you’re the first of the associates who’s ever asked me to lunch? The very first?” She paused to reflect. “Except Ozey, and they treat him, poor man, like the janitor.”
For the rest of lunch they took apart, one by one, the partners of the firm. Doris, of course, had more to say, because she knew them better. At first she showed some slight degree of reticence, but she rapidly lost it as she drank her ale, and by dessert she was speculating freely that Waldron Webb was a sublimated homosexual and that Morris Madison had a neurotic fear of women. It was the most obvious kind of female revenge against a male community: she simply denied that they were men.
“It must be a sorry prospect for a single woman,” Harry observed as they walked back to the office. “You should have gone into advertising.”
“But things have looked up since they started hiring big Irishmen. I may stick around a bit.”
They both laughed and went back to work as easily as if there had been nothing between them but a common employer. Yet Harry was faintly ashamed of his little game of coaxing the woman out from behind the tax computer. It took so little to do it. Doris developed the habit of dropping into his office once a day to smoke a cigarette and “reset her sights,” as she put it. She pretended that it was essential, after a certain number of hours of work at Tower, Tilney, to become “rehumanized.” Together they laughed at things and people, and he found her office gossip amusing, but basically the world in which he lived began outside the doors of the office while hers ended on the same threshold. The little bites of the legal hierarchy raised small red welts in his sensitivity which he could afford to ignore, or at the most irritably scratch, but in her they seemed to secrete a subtle poison which by dint of the constant application of antitoxins had become a necessity to her nature.
He had had too much to do with wo
men not to be aware that the least advance on his part would be immediately and gratefully misinterpreted, and he was determined that no such advance would be made. She had asked him to two cocktail parties at the apartment which she shared in Greenwich Village with another woman lawyer, and he had declined both. Doris had chosen to accept his lame excuses literally and had had the sense not to betray any disappointment that she might have felt. But when the approach was made by a third person, Harry’s plan of action, or inaction, was upset, and so he came to be committed to a weekend with Doris in a cottage in Devon, a small sandy summer settlement on the south shore of Long Island.
It was Lois Grimshawe’s cottage, and the invitation came from her. Nobody knew better than Lois the incongruity, under Judge Tower’s rules, of such a bid from even a senior staff member to a junior associate, and her sense of the indecorum was pasted all over her round, smiling, pink and yellow countenance when she came into Harry’s office.
“You may think it very bold of me, but you have been so very friendly—not at all like the other associates—that I wondered—if you were going to be stuck in town over next weekend—whether you might not like . . .” She paused here, still smiling, and stuck a finger in the high pile of her dyed auburn hair. “Oh, no, but you wouldn’t, of course.”
“Wouldn’t what, Lois?”
“Wouldn’t want to spend that weekend with me in my little place in Devon. Oh, it’s just a shack, you know. We do all our own cooking and everything, but there’s plenty of whiskey and nice neighbors and lots of sun and sea, and if I say so myself we do have fun.” Here Lois giggled.
“Of course I’ll come. I’d love to.”
“Oh, goody!” Lois clapped her hands in excitement. “There’ll be just you and me and Doris Marsh and Henry Barnes, an old friend of mine. He’s a senior cashier at Standard Trust. Really a lovely person. And Marjorie Clinger—you know, Mr. Tilney’s secretary—has the cottage next door, so you’ll see some familiar faces!”
The Collected Stories of Louis Auchincloss Page 9