I had imagined the various reactions that this crafty old man might adopt or even simulate: righteous indignation, thunderous denunciation, withering sarcasm, icy silence. I had not anticipated this particular brand of humility, and my heart seemed to miss a beat as it struck me that it might augur a real danger. A pathetic, self-blaming Blakelock could put me in an ugly light in the business community. If he was going to wail and beat his chest, crying “Mea culpa” and “My son, my son,” would our orderly withdrawal from his firm not take on the appearance of a ruthless raid?
“I was going to come to you, of course, sir, when our plans were complete.”
“You mean, when it would be too late for me to take preventive action?”
“That is one way of putting it. What I was really afraid of was your power of persuasion. You may be surprised to hear it, but I feel that I owe you a lifelong debt for all you have taught me.”
“I am surprised to hear it. Surely I did not teach you to dismember a law firm which, in its trust and naivete, had offered you a partnership.”
Ah, that was better! I thought I could make out the gleam of something like hate in that eye. “No, sir, you did not teach me that. I simply did what I thought I had to do, as you yourself have just put it. But because of my great affection and respect for you, because of all my obligations to you, I feared that I might not be able to resist any urging on your part that I abandon my plans.”
“Your affection and respect for me, Service?” Blakelock’s tone rose shrilly now, but almost at once he caught himself up. Was I wrong in suspecting that he had flared my eagerness to have him take an angry stand? “Well, I suppose people have different ways of expressing those feelings. I daresay there will be those who will criticize you with some harshness, but you and I know how rapidly even the sharpest criticism in this city dies away. Particularly if your new firm is successful. As I’m sure it will be.”
“We have modest hopes, sir.”
“No doubt. And of course you will keep a watchful eye on your young employees. You will know of what they are capable.”
I smiled at this, but my smile was not returned. “Well, I see that words tend to bitterness,” he continued. “And I have no wish to be bitter. Let us turn to the practical details of our severance.”
But it was when I came home that night at nearly ten o’clock, after both girls had gone to bed, that I discovered that, if my life had taken a brave step forward in one direction, it had come to an ugly halt in another. Alice was sitting on the sofa in the living room without a book or a drink or even a cigarette. She had obviously been sitting there grimly, waiting for me to come in.
“Blakelock called you?” I surmised.
“He came to see me. This afternoon. In my office. He suspected that you would not have told me. Perhaps that you had not dared. He wanted me to have his version of what happened before yours.”
“In case I should color it?”
“On the contrary, he wanted to present what you had done in the light most favorable to you. Or perhaps I should say, in the light least unfavorable.”
“With what purpose?”
“He seemed to be afraid that if I heard it as you would tell it, I might pick up and leave you.”
Alice looked very bold and white and handsome as she said this, and I began to feel the tremor around my heart of what I knew was going to be rage.
“So he purported to justify me?”
“He tried to make me see you as representative of your generation. He wanted me to understand that what you had done was not an unusual or even a dishonest thing according to the mores of your contemporaries.”
“And did he convince you?”
“He did not. I still believe that you behaved like a skunk.”
When I spoke at last after this I tried in vain to keep the rasp out of my voice. “Does that mean that you will leave me?”
Alice chose not to answer my question directly. Instead she rose and crossed the room to the fireplace and pointed to the chair opposite the one in which she seated herself. It was suddenly a kind of formal interview.
“I have got to do some thinking, Bob. About us. Some very serious thinking. I realize now that I’ve been putting it off for at least two years. I’ve had a growing suspicion that you are not the man I thought you were. I don’t suppose that is your fault. Except that you may have tried to pull the wool over my eyes. Indeed I fear you are still trying to do so. But now I must learn to see you as a man who is willing to plot in secret to dismember the law firm of his loving and trusting benefactor. A man who considers it a smart piece of business to kick over the ladder that he has so dexterously climbed. A man who takes an unholy pride in putting daggers to the only use he sees for them: plunging them into his neighbor’s back!”
She might have been the avenging angel of my childhood dreams, stern, impassive, without pity, without mercy, a Gustave Dore lithograph. She seemed to be viewing my cowering nudity with an eye too cold for contempt, gathering behind that high, brooding brow the comminations of parents, teachers, a whole generation of elders. How they all scorned my vulnerability, my irredeemable sleaziness! But I was no longer a boy. What had life and long labor done if not to arm me against the savage injustice of their assault? If I was Satan conspiring against the heavenly host, was this not the confrontation that I had always known was bound to come?
“I don’t suppose it would do me any good to defend myself before so prejudiced a tribunal. You have been so snowed that there’s no longer any hope of finding much brain under your false morality. How can you be such an ass, Alice? You’re like my father, an Uncle Tom, broken by a system he failed to dominate, who now prates about his honor and dignity. As if he had either! And if Blakelock believed half the things he pretends to believe in, he’d be a public defender. But of course he’s everything you admire. As opposed to a poor fool of a husband who works his can off to earn the money you’re willing enough to spend!”
“I guess I’d better stop spending it, then,” Alice replied firmly. “I must learn to be on my own. And if that means I must live alone, I must live alone. For a time, anyway.”
“Where will you go?”
“I’ll get a room somewhere. Or stay with friends.”
“And then I suppose you’ll get yourself a smart lawyer and go after a big settlement!” I had to pause here to swallow; my throat was dry, and my temples were throbbing. “But let me tell you something, sister.” Yes, even in my excitement I recall that I heard myself use that vulgar term! But it was too late; I had to push on, noting the gleam of contempt in Alice’s eye. “If you think you’ll get a penny out of me, you have another think coming.” How could I use such language? But I did! “You have no grounds for divorce or separation. I have never been unfaithful to you, never struck you or abused you, never failed to support you. I’ve been a good father and husband, and you are leaving of your own free will. I doubt you’ll even get alimony pendente lite. I shall fight you every step of the way, for the girls, for my money, for my home!”
“I shall ask nothing of you. I shall support myself.”
“You won’t find that so easy,” I sneered.
“I’ll manage somehow. I assume that you’ll pay for the girls and allow me to visit them here until I can afford a place of my own. We can work all that out. I’ve never criticized you as a father.”
For a moment my heart was ripped apart. How could I have lost this splendid girl? And if she saw me as a good father, which I certainly was, and not as a good man, was she possibly not right? Was it too late to undo the whole ghastly mess?
“Alice, don’t be an ass!”
“Isn’t that what you just said I was?”
“If you walk out on me, you’ll give me grounds for a separation. Don’t put yourself in that position. Or at least talk to a lawyer first.”
“I appreciate the warning. And I realize it’s not one that you would normally give a potential opponent. Thank you. But I don’t care what adva
ntage I afford you. Lawyers had nothing to do with our coming together. And so far as I’m concerned they shall have nothing to do with our coming apart.”
All my ire returned with her complacency. It even irritated me that she should take it for granted that I would give her no trouble as a father! Why should she assume so blandly that, mistreated as I was, I would not use any weapon in my arsenal? Actually, she was being an irresponsible parent to risk her own custody of her daughters!
“I’m warning you, Alice. If you leave this apartment, you’ll be breaking the deepest compact that can exist between a man and a woman. I cannot guarantee how I may change as a result. I may turn into an even uglier person than you think me. I may charge you with all kinds of things in court and claim custody of the girls. You may find yourself without money and without a family.”
“That’s ridiculous, and you know it.” Alice rose at this as if to terminate the interview. “What could you possibly do with two daughters, keeping the work hours that you do? You’d end up offering me a salary as their governess. But in the meantime I’ll come here in the evening after the office and have supper with the girls and help them with their homework. We can arrange the weekends later. Who knows? Maybe I’ll be back in a month’s time, begging you to take me in! But I’ve got to try something else, Bob. I really do. And now we’ve said enough for tonight. It’s been a terrible strain.”
“You don’t show it.”
“I don’t always show things. But it may comfort you to know I have a splitting headache. And I’m going to bed now. In Norma’s room.” The maid’s room in our flat was occupied by Norma on the infrequent nights when we were both away. “I’ve already moved my things in there.”
“Alice!”
“Please, Bob. It’s enough for now. Really.”
And so, in a few wretched minutes, a life can be torn in shreds. I took a bottle of whiskey to the strange, hostile solitude of our bedroom.
7
MY LIFE has become such a furnace of work in the organization of my firm that I have not been able to maintain my comforting and consoling habit of entering comments in my journal. It seems to me that I have been nowhere except our new offices on Lexington Avenue and the apartment, where I try to see my girls at least once a day. I have almost lost the power to think except about the problems of my happily successful new law practice. And yet for all the nervous tension there have been rewarding moments. Sometimes at night when both girls are doing their homework and I allow myself a couple of stiff Scotches, my heart actually pounds with exultation. I am pulling it off. I am creating a law firm. By God, I am really pulling it off!
But now, after reading over the last paragraph, I find I must qualify my statement about exultation. It is all very well for a man to talk about the delights of loving his children, but if he cannot confess to himself that the protracted company of two little girls, however bright, however darling, does not have its tedious aspect, he is a self-deceiver. And, of course, it is also true that I bore the girls. They begrudge me the time that I spend asking them perfunctory questions about their friends and school (knowing that I am not really interested), just as I begrudge them the same time taken from office affairs. The closest families are not necessarily those that see most of each other.
I suppose I must admit that Alice has been so quintessential^ the heart of our family that the girls and I find we do not have much of a relationship when she is absent. It is she, after all, who maintains the genuine and constant concern in all details of the girls’ daily lives and who keeps the jokes and the chatter bubbling when we are all four together. I can never seem to remember the names of their friends or teachers. Indeed I had better confess at once that I like to hug them and kiss them and leave it at that. Or at most watch them playing with their friends in Central Park when I am sitting on a bench and have a book to read. It might have been different had I had sons, but I am not even sure of that.
For example, Audrey the other day wanted me to read a blotchy one-page paper that she had written for school on Pizarro and the Incas. I knew that she only wanted my approval. I have learned that in homework children wish the parents either to do it for them or praise what they have done. I’m afraid I did neither.
“I’ve never seen why explorers get so much space in history books,” I said. “If they hadn’t got where they got, someone else would have, the very next year.”
“Miss Lake doesn’t care about explorers. She calls them ‘exploiters.’ She says what Pizarro did to the Incas was cold-blooded murder.”
“But that’s the way the Spaniards did things. If Miss Lake doesn’t like it, why does she want to read about it?”
“Because it’s history, Daddy! And she teaches history. That’s her job.”
“Well, I don’t believe in making snap judgments about historical figures. You weren’t there. You don’t know all the facts. Or even a fraction of them.”
Audrey was as pretty as her mother, but her nature was conventional and little open to new ideas. Sally, her junior by two years, was square-headed and down to earth.
“There’s no point talking to Daddy about homework,” she said flatly. “He doesn’t think like the teachers.”
I usually manage to be out of the apartment when Alice comes; our talks are few and brittle. She tells me that her literary agency business is going well and that she needs nothing. This probably means that her parents are helping her. I am beginning to realize that I shall have to pay her something if she stays away permanently, but I am still betting that she will be forced to return. I know that her parents cannot afford to support her indefinitely.
My mother has now settled the matter. When I came home last night I found her in quiet charge of the apartment and the girls peacefully eating their supper.
“Leave them be, Bob,” she said firmly. “Mix yourself a drink and listen to your old ma.”
Mother, so forceful, yet so thin and plain and gray and somehow immortal, never subject to weather, time or emotion! I have always thought of her as weighing me in the balance and finding me wanting, perhaps because I seemed somehow to threaten Father, or at least her image of him. Yet I never feel that she disapproves of me, or even that she does not love me. It is more as if I were in some strange fashion too much for her and that she has always been fair enough to blame herself for this more than she does me. I have perplexed her, but is that, her troubled look seems to ask, my fault?
“The way you’re living is no way to live. You can’t look after the girls and work the hours you do. You’ve got to let Alice come back and live in this apartment while you get a room somewhere.”
“But this is my home, Ma!”
“Alice is a bargain. She’ll look after the girls and the apartment for free. You’ll save money on a housekeeper. And you needn’t worry about the legal angles. Your father, at Alice’s insistence, has drawn up a document by which she waives any rights against you for leaving this apartment and renounces all claims to alimony. He hated to do it, but she made him. So you see, nobody’s trying to trick you out of anything. We just want to get on with our lives, that’s all.”
I felt that I was being put in a very shabby position. Everyone else, it was being made to appear, cared only for the welfare of my daughters while I was standing on a bundle of petty legal rights. And yet I was being quietly done out of my home, wife and offspring!
“I don’t see what right Alice has, deserting me, to expect such favorable treatment.”
“She has no rights. She’s not expecting anything. I’m the one who’s arranged it all. I’ve talked to the girls, and they want their mother back. They love you, Bob, but you’re never home.”
“Is that my fault?”
“Fault? Oh, you lawyers! Look here, my child. You’re up against four women, and you haven’t a chance. Do what you’re told and be thankful.”
Mother had a point. I was licked, and I guess I was glad to be licked. Today I moved to the Stafford, and Alice came back to the ap
artment. I suppose it may be a relief at last to be able to devote all my time to my firm. God knows it needs it. And the acrimony between Alice and me is now much reduced. Having her back in the apartment may pave the way for our reunion.
8
IT HAS NOW BEEN six months since I made the last entry in my journal. Managing a successful and rapidly growing law firm has taken most of my time, the bulk of my energy and just about all that has been left of my heart. At this writing we are seventeen partners and thirty-nine associates, and we have to take additional space. With a couple of years’ hard work and a continuation of my lucky streak we should become one of the major corporate law firms in the city. Stranger things have happened.
It has not been easy, nor has it been without the shattering effects on my personal life to which I will duly advert. The main trouble, in the office, has been in establishing myself as the administrative head of the firm. The crying need for a strong executive is not always recognized by lawyers. There is still some survival of the old-fashioned notion that a “real” lawyer will be so absorbed in his practice that he will tend to be restless at any administrative restrictions imposed by his office. Lawyers who despise problems of management as petty and distracting invariably regard themselves as having a larger vision and greater souls than those who do not. In sober truth they are more apt to be selfish prima donnas, indifferent to the suffering and inconvenience to their staff caused by chaos in maintenance.
Glenn Deane was my principal opponent in this. He has sought to establish his own little firm within a firm, treating his “faithful” junior partners and clerks to limousines and first-class air tickets, allowing them to keep irregular hours and, worst of all, surrounding himself with a miniature court that laughs appreciatively at his sneering cracks at “drill sergeant Bob Service” who wants to convert a group of “liberal philosophers” into “goose-stepping Prussians.” I have argued with him again and again, but he only laughs at me—or worse, promises me reforms that he has no intention of making.
Diary of a Yuppie Page 5