False Gods

by Louis Auchincloss

  And finally there was Myron in a portrait by William Draper, which Myron, not the firm, had paid for. Gone now was any suggestion of law or law reports, of elegant oratory in the courtroom or less elegant bargaining in the conference chamber. Myron was seen as tall and finely built with thick, curled, prematurely grey hair at the wheel of his sailing yacht, his handsome profile facing into a marine breeze. And where were the clients? Left at the dock perhaps.

  Well, at least there would be no more entries. The worst part of each business day in the last terrible two years had been quitting time. He had come actually to dread the moment when Mrs. Olyphant, his large, bland, elderly, remorselessly smiling secretary, or “executive assistant,” as she preferred to style herself, would loom in his doorway, pad in hand, and announce, like a nurse shaking a bottle of despised medicine, “Time for entries, Mr. Townsend!”

  When he had started to practice law, it had been the tolerated attitude of both partners and clerks to look down on the allotment of work to hours in the day, to regard the totaling of “chargeable time” as a wart on the fair countenance of a noble profession and to leave the vulgar business of billing to a largely invisible accounting staff supervised by a managing partner whose bizarre enthusiasm for such tedious matters was viewed with outward gratitude and inner contempt. But those were the days when clerks were paid less than stenographers. Now the computer, ruthless seeker-out of escalating overhead, was the powerful searchlight that beamed its deadly ray into every corner of the firm’s activities to spy each dusty hour not lubricated with the winking gleam of gain.

  “What did I do today, Mrs. Olyphant?”

  “Well, there was Miss Irwin’s codicil.”

  “Ah, yes, of course. Put in three hours for that.”

  “I should have thought it was more like one. And you told the dear lady you wouldn’t bill her more than a hundred bucks. If you charge her with that much time, you’ll have to write most of it off, and accounting will want to know why.”

  “All right, all right. Put her down for one and charge two to Saint Joseph’s Hospital.”

  “But there’s that memo of Mr. Collins’s, you know.”

  “What memo?”

  “The one where he said he wanted to review all charitable clients whose hours topped a hundred in any one quarter. We’ve been putting an awful lot of hours on Saint Joseph’s recently.”

  He knew she meant well. She loved working for a senior partner, and the social reputation of the Townsends appealed to her snobbish if amiable nature. But she knew perfectly how vulnerable he was. More belligerent than he, she believed he should assert his rank and refuse to send in any entries at all, and had so urged him, but so long as he dared not do this, she sought at least to minimize his misrepresentations.

  “All right. Put in two hours for Office.”

  “Under what heading?”

  “Just Office General.”

  She ventured a chuckle. “Isn’t there a limit to how much more we can sweep under that carpet?”

  He laughed in spite of himself. “You mean it’s so lumpy now one can hardly walk on it? Very well. Put two hours under the heading of educating associates. I had to explain some things to Nat Danford.”

  But it was a mistake to have laughed with Mrs. Olyphant. She always took immediate and cheerful advantage of it. “Mr. Collins will be saying that young man should be paying tuition. We’ve put in more hours for him than a law school semester!”

  Her use of “we” showed indeed how much she was on his side, but he suddenly could bear no more. “I’ll do them tomorrow,” he said testily as he rose.

  “But you’re behind three days now, sir!”

  “Good night, Mrs. Olyphant!”

  The end had come with a visit from Ralph Collins, a batch of computer print-outs draped ominously over his arm.

  “I’ve been trying to get hold of you for a week now, Myron. You’re a hard man to nail down.”

  “I’ve been pretty busy, Ralph.”

  “Have you now? Well, that’s just what I want to talk to you about. A man can be awfully busy without making much money, and if that’s the case, perhaps he should change something in his work habits. I’ve been going over your time sheets and comparing them with the income statements of your department.”

  Collins, pale, slight and balding, had shining, colorless eyes behind gold-rimmed spectacles. His eyes smiled too much. It was not, Myron surmised, really cruelty; it was hardly even amusement. It was rather the curiosity, quite removed from the irrelevance of either sympathy or dislike, of a scientist performing an interesting experiment. A senior partner who had survived his utility to the firm (if indeed he had ever had any), a representative of Knickerbocker New York, a Wasp, as the current term had it, was being presented with irrefutable evidence that the partnership bearing the name of his father and grandfather was losing more money than could be justified in maintaining his shrunken practice of trusts and estates. What would he say? How would he take it?

  “I don’t need to see the figures, Ralph,” Myron snapped. “I assume they’re quite dreadful. I shan’t question them. I’ll try to run a tighter ship. Next quarter should be better. The Sanford trust accounting should be ready for billing.”

  “The Sanford trust has been billed, Myron. It was billed last year, and the bank has questioned it. I am told we’ll be lucky if we get paid half of it, and that will show the matter as a loss. But never mind the individual bills. The fact is, your department has been running in the red for three years now. Ever since the Bradley estate was closed. Do you see any more big estates like that coming in?”

  “Well, I suppose there’s always my wife’s to look forward to,” Myron observed, with heavy irony.

  “Bella, I’m sure, will bury us all, and let us hope she does! But actually, Myron, didn’t you once tell me that the bulk of her money is in trust? And that Milbank Tweed is counsel there?”

  “It’s true.” Myron shrugged, ready now to give up the futile argument. “There’d be only peanuts for us to handle. What do you want, Ralph? To shut down the department? Isn’t it an asset to a corporate law firm to have a general practice? How can we call ourselves lawyers if we can’t even draw a will?”

  “My dear Myron, we can always hire someone to do that. And, anyway, we live in an era of referrals. More and more firms are specializing. What I am finding it very difficult to justify to the younger partners at our weekly lunches (which, incidentally, you have been noticeably avoiding of late) is why you need two associates, two secretaries and an accountant to run a department that appears to be consistently losing money.”

  “Are there no such things as intangible values?”

  “I note they tend to be cited by those who fail to produce tangible ones.”

  “And the fact that there’s been a Townsend in the firm since 1875—that goes for nothing? How do you know, when a client walks past that door bearing my family’s name to consult you about one of his mergers, that he isn’t relying, at least in part, on the respectability that my father and grandfather gave the firm?”

  “I don’t know. But I do know that we live in a world that seems to care very little about the past. Everything is now, now, now. Take our balance sheets. The time was when we had to check them only at the end of the year. Then it was quarterly, then monthly, then weekly. And now I find myself asking our controller: Have we had a good day?”

  “Isn’t it all rather hysterical?”

  “It is. But it’s life. Even the biggest firms live so close to the line these days that with a couple of bad months they have to start thinking of laying people off.”

  “Well, certainly in estates we’ve already been cut to the bone. I couldn’t run things with one less hand.”

  “I’m afraid you’ll have to, Myron. We’re eliminating a clerk, a secretary and the accountant.”

  “Good God!” Myron jumped to his feet. “You leave me with one lawyer and one girl! Who is going to do the work, I’d like to know?�
��

  “I guess you are, Myron. And I’m afraid that’s not all. We’re cutting your percentage by a full half.”

  Myron gaped. “A third-year clerk will be making more than I will!”

  “And bringing in more business, too, I’m afraid.”

  “Very well, Collins. I resign. As of today. And you can take my name off the letterhead. I don’t care to have it associated with such a bunch of cheapskates.”

  Collins’s smile was usually a fixed one, not really a smile at all, but now it broadened into a beam. “As to resigning, you must do as you see best. My terms stand if you change your mind. But we’re not going to alter the firm name. That Townsend is not you, nor even perhaps your father. It’s your grandfather. And I have little doubt that if he were here today, he’d be telling you what I’ve just told you.”

  That evening, over a cocktail, in their beautiful long white living room looking down on the East River, he told Arabella of his decision. She listened with her usual air of tranquillity, occasionally turning the thin gold bracelet on her left wrist. She rarely seemed surprised at anything he had to tell her; her small, neat, trim motionless figure, her smooth grey hair and the blue gaze of her calmly appraising eyes seemed ready for any contingency, at least that he might offer. She didn’t look her sixty years because she didn’t look any age. She was not so much pretty as perfect; her appearance suggested her philosophy of doing the best one could, the very best, with whatever material one had been given.

  “Well, of course I think it’s wonderful news. I’ve wanted you to retire for two years now.”

  “Two years? Why two?”

  “Because you haven’t had any pleasure in your work for the past two years. Perhaps even more, but I’ve noticed it only in that time.”

  Really, she was marvellous! When she seemed least to note she was most noting. In the five years of their marriage she has learned everything there was to know about him, and what had he learned about her that he hadn’t already known?

  “And what do we do now? Go round and round the world? On your money?”

  “On our money, silly. But of course we won’t do anything so ridiculous. What did Emerson say of travel? That it was taking ruins to ruins? I have a very different plan. One that I’ve had two years to think about.”

  Bella’s fortune came from her mother, who had got it from hers. You had to go back to her great-grandfather to find the first earning male. This unusual situation, Myron had observed with a wry amusement, had created a curious attitude on her part about money. It was something that only women, trained women, really knew how to handle and spend. Men were apt to hoard it or blow it or dissipate it on things that didn’t essentially make them happier.

  He and she had lost their first mates to cancer; both had deemed themselves inconsolable. Friends had conspired to bring them together; the compatibility of similar tastes and difficult children (he had a radical daughter, she an alcoholic son) had tightened the initial bond of loneliness, and in their union they had found a life of peacefulness and early hours.

  “I’ve been thinking of the plea you got to head up the fund drive for the Staten Island Zoo,” she told him. “Why not take that on? You love that zoo, and now you’re going to have the time to do it. I have an idea that you might make a great fund raiser. You’ve always worried about your ability to make money for yourself. Why not show people that you can make it for others?”

  “Bella!” he exclaimed in astonishment. “What an interesting idea! Have you been nursing it for long?”

  “I’ve been waiting till you were ready. And now let’s get on with it. I think you’re going to need your old office. I’ll rent it from Ralph Collins. Don’t worry. I’ll know how to handle him. And Mrs. Olyphant. She’ll be a great hand at this game.”

  Myron began to feel that a whole wonderful new life was being placed squarely, perhaps even a bit heavily, in his taken-for-granted lap. But mightn’t this be what happiness was?

  “Bella,” he asked in sudden suspicion, “have you been discussing this project with Mrs. Olyphant?”

  She simply smiled and suggested that they celebrate the occasion with a rare second cocktail.

  2

  And so his new life started.

  The beginning was simple enough. His offer to take the chairmanship of the major fund drive about to be launched by the Staten Island Zoological Gardens, of whose board he had long been a devoted member, was, needless to say, gratefully accepted, and Ralph Collins, deftly handled by the tactful Bella, was found agreeable to the idea of having a Townsend back in his office at no cost to the firm, indeed, actually paying rent. If Collins was still not wholly convinced of the “intangible values” of an old name, he was perfectly willing to pick up any such values that came free. Mrs. Olyphant, moreover, proved superb and efficient in her new role. Free of the nagging interference of an office manager, she roundly snubbed the secretaries of the younger partners, who had once tossed in her face that their bosses paid for hers. And at the zoo offices, to which she repaired on alternate afternoons, she trained the girls in public relations in how to address rich potential donors—and in how to pronounce their names. Her years of reading the social columns in magazines and evening journals became a distinct asset to the drive.

  Myron found that he loved the work. His rich friends and relatives, who had regarded him, a bit ruefully, as too much the easygoing club gentleman to be entrusted with the thorny tax planning of their estates, were delighted to find that they could oblige him by contributing to an institution in which many of them were anyway interested. And Myron did much more than just solicit them. He would take them, one by one, to an excellent lunch in a private dining room in the zoo’s administration building, followed by a visit “behind the scenes” to see a baby elephant born or the big cats hosed or a polar bear operated on or whatever the particular event of the day happened to be.

  In time he learned to match the exhibition to the particular taste of the visitor. The ladies liked the little furry animals, the more brightly colored birds and the young of almost any species. The men preferred the large dangerous predators. Sometimes Myron, suspecting a sadistic streak, would take a corporation president to see mice eaten by snakes, and for the lewdly inclined the monkeys could always be counted on to copulate. The keepers had been told to produce, if feasible, what Myron asked for, and the only time he had a serious row with the director was when a proposed “spat” between two leopards had got out of control and resulted in the serious mauling of one of the beasts.

  The money poured in. Myron was quick to pick up the tricks of his new trade: to get the poorer trustees to pledge more than they could pay (with private assurance they would not be dunned) so that the richer ones would not feel they were being stuck with the whole load; to name the first baby of any species to be born in captivity after a generous lady (with much publicity); to whisper in the ear of one tycoon that another, his particular rival, was pledging twice his sum; to abrogate the names of buildings and wings as soon as the donor’s family had become extinct or obscure, so as to have more tags available for new givers; to sell positions on the organizing committees of benefit parties to social climbers and even a seat at Amy Bledsoe’s table for twenty-five g’s.

  Bella herself now took on the job of chairman of a big drive for the Manhattan Gallery of Art, of which she had long been a trustee, and centered her activities in Townsend, Cox & Collins, where she rented an office next to her husband’s. “We’ll be known as Mr. and Mrs. New York,” she said with mock smugness. Ralph Collins’s tongue seemed to drip as he noted the passage through the reception hall of some of the biggest names in town. Surely some of these might stick! Myron found himself now invited to the firm lunches he had not dared to attend when he was a nonproducing partner.

  It was intoxicating. He had always been deeply mortified by his inability to make big money in a money society, and even when he had, on rare occasions, got his hands on a large fee, he had been haunted by
the sense that he had not really earned it, that it had been simply based on a percentage of an estate that had come to the firm through an earlier Townsend.

  But now he discovered—or Bella discovered for him (he was happy to give her full credit)—an ability in himself, which nobody could challenge, of raising sums far larger than any partner of his old firm could have dreamed of charging as a fee. He was their equal at last, and it wasn’t just because he was Sidney Townsend’s grandson, either. Staring boldly at the latter’s portrait as he strode through the reception hall, he asked himself with a complaisant sneer who in the world would have given so mean-looking an old codger a blasted nickel no matter what worthy cause he was touting!

  Myron and Bella carried their work into the evening hours. She had always been less critical than he of dull parties so long as they were, as she put it, “well done.” Ever a keen observer of food, wine, service and décor, the latter including the gowns of her hostess and the lady guests, she was inclined to forgive bad talk for good appearance. And of course, as a museum trustee, she could put up with the fiercest bore if his walls were hung with masterpieces and his table covered with fine porcelain. But now she shared with Myron a single criterion: their hosts had to be wealthy or have wealthy guests. Dinner parties were no longer dull play; they had become stimulating work. Even if they took up every evening in the week, they never palled.

  The only difficulty was in not appearing too available to the socially ambitious and thus watering their stock-in-trade.