Diary of a Yuppie

by Louis Auchincloss

  I never make the mistake, as he does, of neglecting my relations with my partners, even the youngest. The associates I can afford to treat impersonally, with simple good manners, as it is never too late to cultivate the small number of them who will eventually be made members of the firm. Indeed, there may even be an advantage in the sudden offer of intimacy by the senior partner who has, until one’s day of grace, seemed a remote figure. But with the actual partners I cultivate a near intimacy, taking them regularly to lunch, one by one, and inquiring into their problems, legal and domestic. I am counting on this to stand me in good stead in any showdown with Deane.

  That such a showdown is on its way seems inevitable after what occurred at our first formal office dinner. We had taken a private dining room at the University Club for a party that included all partners and associates, together with their spouses or guests. Alice, you may be surprised to hear, was my “spouse” for the occasion.

  She and I have been on much more friendly terms of late. On two occasions we have taken the girls out to Keswick for Sunday lunch, once with my parents and once with hers, and we have occasionally walked in the park with them on Saturday afternoons. Ours has become what is called a “civilized” separation, which means, I trust, that it will eventually end—at least when Alice comes to her senses. She has even helped with the arrangements for the office party, ordering the menu and the flowers and seating the dinner tables.

  Her kindness, however, had to be used for her husband’s benefit that night, for Deane, who had had, as usual, too many drinks, poked odious fun at my speech. I had tried to sound a serious note:

  “A party like this should be a fun occasion, of course, but there’s no law that says we cease to be good fellows if we have a moment of seriousness. So bear with me while I say this. We are a young firm. Our oldest lawyer is only thirty-seven. We haven’t the ‘advantage’ of bad portraits of bearded forebears or medallions over the drinking fountains offering us samples of the wisdom of the past. But for that very reason we should remind ourselves from time to time that we are still parts of a great tradition. I have spoken to many of you about the hypocrisy of some older members of the bar who orate about public service as they pocket big fees, but that needn’t mean that public service doesn’t exist or that we can’t be a part of it. I intend that we shall do our part in pro bono work. I expect us all to live up to the ideals we have inherited.”

  “Fortunately, we don’t pay taxes on that kind of inheritance!”

  Enough had been drunk so that even the more discreet associates laughed at Deane’s barked interjection.

  “All laughing aside,” I retorted in a dry tone that partially restored the silence of the chamber, “I think it is necessary to recall these things, banal as it may sound. For we should be an instrument of justice as well as the servant of those who retain us, officers of the bar as well as spokesmen for business. The greatest law firms of this city stand for more than the roster of their clients, and I’ll be damned if I don’t live to see our firm become as great as any!”

  “Our managing partner,” Glenn now exclaimed, jumping to his feet amid the applause that followed my remarks, “has just seen fit to damn himself! For was it not precisely the turgid pomposity of the so-called great law firms that we pledged ourselves to break away from? And was it Bob Service, the lofty seeker of the eternal verities in the cerulean sky, whom we followed or the agile Bob who knew just when to place his dagger between the shoulder blades of Branders Blakelock?”

  This, too, was greeted with some laughs, but they were nervous laughs. Everyone in that room could now feel that ours was no friendly argument.

  “That’s not a matter for levity!” I called out angrily.

  “No, of course not. I crave your pardon for violating the Robert Service law of gravity!”

  Alice after dinner came over to me and hooked her arm under mine to lead me away from the others.

  “What an utter bastard Glenn is,” she murmured in my ear. “Poor Bob, you were trying so hard. Maybe a bit too hard.”

  I was sore and angry that it should be so obvious that I needed sympathy, but it was still something to have Alice on my side. There was a feeling in her tone that made me want to ask why I should care what anyone thought about anything so long as she was with me.

  “How about lunching with me tomorrow?” I asked her. “Do you realize you’ve never even seen my new offices?”

  “I think I’d like that, Bob. Yes, I think I really would.”

  Now that it is beginning to look as if Alice might be thinking of coming back to me, I find myself a bit cooler in assessing her character. It is not that I don’t want her back; I do. But I must be consistent with my long-held resolution of seeing things straight.

  Alice is a wonderful woman, perhaps even a great one. She is large of spirit, generous and fine. Wherever you tap her with your hammer she rings true. My parents, who are also to some extent “true blues,” though made of coarser material, instinctively appreciate her and take her side against their own child. But the essential difference between her and me is not that I am less pure, less “good” than she—although I might be willing to concede this—but that she will not recognize in her own nature the spots and warts that I admit, however reluctantly, in my own.

  If “good people” are those who think they are good and “bad people” are those who know they are bad, then the election between souls that are saved and souls that are damned becomes as arbitrary as any conceived by the Jansenists of old. There is no real reason that with better “public relations” I should not appear as noble a character as Alice.

  For could I not have shown up Glenn Deane as motivated by near lunatic jealousy of my success? And wasn’t he? And could I not have presented Branders Blakelock as a Dracula who sucks the life blood of handsome young clerks? And isn’t he? And might I not have won Alice back by falling on my knees before her, like Richard of York, and declaring that I had eviscerated my old firm for her sake? And, in a way, hadn’t I? Who would benefit more than she by my greater revenues?

  At Columbia I wrote a term paper on the novels of Dame Ivy Compton-Burnett. That marvelous old maid conceived of humanity as divided into sheep and goats, the former a submissive passive majority and the latter a shrill dominating minority. The sheep have only their wit and irony with which to resist the tyranny of the latter, but this sometimes suffices, as the pompous goats are extremely sensitive to ridicule. What I learned from Dame Ivy is that human beings may be milder and more tepid than their supposed counterparts in heroic fiction and drama, and that, like the lower animals, they run truer to type than idealists suppose. If I am to be a goat, I must not allow the barbs of the silly sheep to destroy me.

  Yet Alice, sitting before the desk in my new office the next day, before we went to lunch, seemed quite unprepared with barbs. She was unstinting in her praise of my pale yellow walls, my emerald-green carpet, my eight large flower prints.

  “They’re Thorntons, aren’t they?”

  Indeed they were. I was surprised at her perspicacity, but when pictures had a literary flavor she was apt to be on target. I loved these romantic prints. The corollas of the flowers were huge and brilliant, like the heads of beautiful, dangerous women, and the landscapes were distant panoramas, adapted to the supposed moods of the plants. A poisonous arum was seen before a rainstorm breaking over gray, craggy peaks, roses grew before the backdrop of a ruined temple, some eighteenth-century folie, and the night-blooming cereus exploded as in fire before a Gothic church outlined in the moonlight. What was I but a humble mortal before the glorious carnivorous plant of the law? Behind my desk I had hung the sacred Egyptian lotus, an explosion of golden petals dominating a distant dim desert where small pyramids, symbols of death, were arranged.

  “You may ask why I put flowers in a law office,” I said. “It’s because they are my idea of what is at once civilized and savage.”

  “Let’s go to lunch, Bob.”

  “Do you mi
nd if I talk for a minute about my philosophy of law? You’ve never really believed that I had one.”

  “Right now?”

  “Yes. Because I want you to hear it before I formally propose that we come back together again.”

  Alice gave me a long look in which I thought I could read several things. But I think that assent—or at least a willingness to consider assent—was one of them. Or was she simply debating that for the girls’ sake, and my sake, or perhaps even for her own, she had better make the best of me? That I was a bit mad, but perhaps not as wicked as she had neurotically assumed?

  “I’m listening, Bob.”

  I told her now, in all gravity, that I was determined that my firm should be a success. And not just a financial success, either: a moral success. I was resolved that it would be a union of highly trained, competent men and women who would do everything for a client that could be lawfully done. We should be taut, keen, hard-boiled, comprehensive. There would be no room for sentimentality and none for sloppiness. Uniform rules of office procedure would be laid down and rigidly adhered to; overhead would be kept strictly under control. Partners and associates would be paid in accordance with the quality of their labor and the fees that it produced. The perfect machinery of the firm would be totally at the service of its legal expertise.

  And what would that expertise be used for? Well, first and foremost, of course, for the clients—for the skillful handling of their interests within the last letter of the law, but never a millimeter beyond. Nor would the client ever be subjected to the smallest piece of moral advice or guidance; all such matters would be strictly the client’s affair. My firm would be a sharp cutting weapon to be picked up and used; weapons did not preach, but they had to be paid for. On the other hand, when we operated in the public area—and I was willing to commit us to a substantial number of hours a week for pro bono work—then we would show an equal zeal and an equal ruthlessness. Even should my biggest client, for example, Atlantic Rylands, object to a suit that we were bringing—say, on an environmental issue—it would be told, politely but firmly, to mind its own business.

  When I had finished Alice was silent. Then she asked unexpectedly, “Do you ever see Mr. Blakelock? I wonder what he’d think of your ideals?”

  “As a matter of fact I had lunch with him last week. I told him just what I’ve told you.”

  “And what did he say?”

  I hesitated for several moments. But then I saw, in what I deemed a flash of true Service inspiration, that the truth was precisely what might clinch her coming back to me. “He wasn’t very nice. He said that what I was really doing was putting together a firm that another Robert Service would not be able to eviscerate.”

  Alice’s hands flew to her mouth in a gesture of combined horror and amusement. “Ah, the wicked man!” she cried. Then she got up. “Let’s go to lunch, darling.” Darling? I was right! “I’m starved. But don’t worry; I’m on your side. I shan’t be a silly ass again. At least not for a while, I hope. Oh, Bob, the world takes a lot of knowing, doesn’t it?”

  One thing I resolved, when I returned to work after our long and happy meal in which we split a bottle of Pouilly-Fume, was to continue to keep this journal in my office after I should have come home to my old apartment. I have no intention of taking the chance that Alice might read of my intention somehow to dispose of Glenn Deane. She has not yet learned to accept the necessity of getting rid of rotten apples or the fact that the “good life” is only bought at a price. But I am now fairly confident that Alice can learn this in time. After all, she is very intelligent.

  I have told Douglas Hyde to keep a sharp eye on Deane. Douglas is my “number two” in the firm, my “executive officer,” a large-featured, snowy-haired young man who never loses his temper, a silent operator who sees that life is funny without more than smirking at it, an indefatigable worker and, I guess, as ambitious a lawyer as myself. Douglas would use me, but it would be for my benefit as well as his own. He and I are a team.

  9

  WELL, I HAVE “done the deed.”

  For Glenn at last was guilty of something gravely out of line with the policy of our firm. At a meeting in my office of the executive committee, consisting of him, myself, Douglas Hyde and Peter Stubbs, he actually suggested that three of “his” associates, because of the “splendid” work they had done for his client Ace Investors, be given an extra award of five thousand dollars apiece despite the fact that the Christmas bonuses to the lawyers and staff had already been announced.

  “But that’s preposterous!” I exclaimed. “It would throw our whole compensation scheme out of whack. What can you be thinking of, Glenn?”

  “I’m thinking of three crack lawyers who have worked their asses off and deserve to be rewarded for their missing posteriors.”

  “All our people work hard.”

  “Not like mine, kiddo. Not like mine.”

  “That’s ridiculous! And even if it were so, it’s no reason to make invidious distinctions. We can’t run a firm if every partner is going to demand special treatment for his associates.”

  “Every partner? Am I every partner?”

  “All right, any partner.”

  “That’s hogwash, Bob, and you know it. The partners who bring in the bacon are entitled to have their minor requests honored without all this haggling. Hell, I’d vote the same bonus for your people.”

  “But I’d never ask it. That’s the difference between us. This business of firms within firms has got to stop. This business of partners acting as lobbyists for their own departments. Quit being such a mother hen, Glenn! Your chicks are no more yours than they are Peter’s or Doug’s or mine.”

  Now why did I have to be quite so nasty? Was I spoiling for a fight? I was. I had the feeling that a showdown was due between us and that it was better to push it while I held the good cards.

  Glenn, I should explain, now seemed to me the very embodiment of all that was wrong with our world. He was violent and undisciplined. He grabbed whatever it pleased him to grab. And having no morals, or even any guiding principles, he protected himself in the only way such a creature could—with a bodyguard of unquestioning dependents. Wasn’t that the way all civilizations were fated to end, with Alarics and Attilas leading troops of blindly loyal ruffians into bloody and ruthless battle against each other? Where the loyalty of the lesser to the greater brute was the only quality left that could even be said to resemble a virtue?

  Glenn, at any rate, called for a vote, although, as a committee, we had always acted on consensus. When he lost, three to one, he announced furiously that he would take the matter to the firm, which he proceeded to do at the next of our biweekly lunches.

  These lunches, which were faithfully attended by every partner not actually in court or at a closing or out of town, were held in a private dining room in a midtown lunch club. After a first course of general chatter, I would call the meeting to order and initiate the discussion of firm matters. It was then that I responded to Glenn’s demand for the three bonuses denied by the committee:

  “Let me say at once, gentlemen, that I regard the question of compensation as within the exclusive jurisdiction of the executive committee. That committee cannot be reversed. It can only be abolished and a new committee appointed in its place. A vote in favor of Mr. Deane’s resolution is in effect a vote to abolish the committee.”

  “I don’t give a damn how I get my bonuses,” Glenn retorted in his most grating tone, “so long as I get them. If abolishing the executive committee is the only efficient way to run this firm, then I say let’s abolish it!” He glared defiantly around the table. “And, yes, I do so move. Are you going to second my motion, Lew?”

  “I second it, Glenn.”

  “Address the chair, please!” I called out.

  “I second it, Mr. Service.” Lew Pessen was Glenn’s particular sidekick.

  “Very well, the motion is made and seconded,” I announced tartly. “Before it is voted on I ask every
partner to consider carefully the effect of this procedure on the future of the firm. You will be deciding whether you wish to be managed by rules or by whim. You will be deciding whether every policy of your chosen managers will be subject to reversal by any disgruntled partner who shouts for special treatment.”

  “Can’t we just vote on a simple bonus question without all this emotion?” cried Glenn.

  “I want to finish, Mr. Deane. I want to emphasize the extreme gravity of this vote on the welfare of the firm.” I paused here for several seconds. “Very well, will all those in favor of the motion please raise their right hand.”

  Three hands in addition to Glenn’s were promptly raised. The motion was lost. But four was a dangerous dissent. I resolved that the war with Deane should now be to the death. As he was volatile and I was patient it should not be too long before I found the proper time and cause.

  And indeed my opportunity came sooner than I expected. Only a week after the turbulent partners’ lunch meeting, in a discussion with Douglas Hyde about the firm’s reaction to our now distributed Christmas bonuses, I made an important discovery. The reaction had been unanimously enthusiastic.

  “Even with Deane’s disappointed trio?” I asked sharply.

  “Even them. They don’t seem disappointed at all. In fact, I hear they seem particularly smug about something.”

  I jumped up from my desk. “That’s it, then!” I cried. I was too excited for a second to say more.