They exchanged a look of complete understanding. He said: “I think I can find a way not to hurt her.”
“It won’t be easy. She meant well.”
“Maybe just skirt the issue by telling her the time’s not right…. What are your reasons for withholding it from Maud?”
“Its tone.” Lucy was fast: “Its all-seeingness. What are yours?”
“The same,” he answered. “That it’s too definite. That, and its kind of—anger.” He could have gone on, elaborating about the letter’s effect on himself: that its certitudes tended to thwart his personal need to question and to wonder, which questions and wonderings, by the very nature of their search, would keep him more closely in touch with a preferred memory of Mrs. Leigh as a beloved exaggeration of his own grapplings with life’s everyday devils. He only said: “I’ll square it somehow with Fanny Coates…. Look! There’s Ralph”—seen, hell-bent, running toward them: “God, he’s been in the creek again. Down, boy”—Ralph a wet-haired mess, big paws muddy, mouth opened in a drunk’s grin of joy at having met them on the meadow’s avenue. “Down!”
But Lucy was gleeing with Ralph, petting him, rumpling his ears, exclaiming: “He’s such an optimist, Morgan. Such a real, true-blue believer!”
Morgan laughed: “About what I’m not sure, but I certainly know what you mean.” And, looking at Lucy, appreciating her: “You’re wonderful, Luce.”
“Tell it to the Marines,” she cocked at him. And, quickly, with a closer emphasis: “Or better still, to Gerry next time you see him.” And further, with appeal: “You pray for me, and I’ll pray for you. Okay?”
“Okay.”
They turned and started back across the meadow, walking slowly arm in arm, Ralph in his bliss cavorting around them.
On Sunday, Ansel Shurtliff returned to his home amidst his orchards, now in winter hibernation. And Lucy went back to New York. And on the next day Caroline and Julia went back to school. And Morgan back to the law, his office now a high juridical aerie in Cleveland’s Union Commerce Building: sixteen months ago he had joined the Kissel, Chandler firm. Judge Malcolm had lived just long enough to congratulate him.
On ordinary mornings he left the house for the drive into Cleveland around a quarter to eight, after breakfasting with Maud and Julia and Caroline, after good-byes to them and Tessa and Ralph (handshake of a lifted paw). But on this first Monday morning after Mrs. Leigh’s death, the ritual altered: he and Maud said their good-byes in the privacy of his study. “You’ll be all right?” he asked her, holding her face between his hands, seeking to read her eyes.
“I’ve got to be,” she answered, shaky, her emotions all on the surface.
“What time is Lillie Ruth coming?” He was counting on Lillie Ruth.
“At ten.”
“I’ll call you at lunch-time.”
They told each other the best words: I love you. He picked up his briefcase. “Your gloves,” she said. “Don’t forget your gloves.” And he left her, feeling that he could, for when he kissed her she had mustered up a smile for him.
One of the negotiated conditions of his move to Kissel, Chandler had been that he retain his partnership with Judge Malcolm in the Hatherton firm. After Judge Malcolm’s death the Hatherton firm, as per agreement, was merged with Kissel, Chandler, and from his Cleveland office Morgan presided over it on a de jure, de facto basis, the on-the-scene running of it left in the hands of a junior partner and two associates. Thus it remained intact, prospering, and still honoring Judge Malcolm’s name. About the arrangement, Morgan was not shy to express his pleasure.
Nor was he shy of professional pride at having become a member of the Kissel, Chandler firm.
Roger Chandler, the firm’s founder, remained its perpetual surpriser. At sixty-eight years of age, he still gave off a whiff of being something of a boy wonder. He was exuberantly energetic. Always had been. His intelligence, his charm, his legal brilliance were all in place. Always had been. Plus, as he said of himself (never when a lady was present), he’d been born not with a silver spoon in his mouth, but with a silver horseshoe up his derriere: “Luck is my middle name.” Twenty-five years ago, when he had decided to start his own firm, he publicly avouched that it would be “a great one,” and went to work to make it so. And succeeded; to such extent that, now, there were adjunct Kissel, Chandler offices in Pittsburgh and New York and Washington, between which offices he regularly (in his words) “rode circuit.” He was a terrific litigator. He argued a case the way a brick-layer lays bricks, one solid word at a time, perfectly placed and carefully cemented in the wall of his argument. Over the years it was said of him that he was at least “acquainted” with everyone worth knowing. “Rumor,” he said of this charge: “Pure rumor.” But at an apropos moment, he would recount to you the circumstance that had provided him the chance to shake Will Rogers’s hand and Amelia Earhart’s. And one evening, at Henry Luce’s home, Chiang Kaishek’s. His “longest brush with artistic fame was an after-dinner game of bridge, two of the players yours truly and—don’t even bother to guess—Artur Rubinstein.” (Over this memory he always particularly smiled.) And there were many unceremonious photographs, such as the one of him sitting with John Foster Dulles on someone’s garden bench, both men hatless and coatless and tieless, which informality of dress told a lot about their “acquaintanceship.” And it was recorded in print that two journalist luminaries of the time—Ed Murrow and John Gunther—referred to him as “my friend.” Much, much more could be told about Roger Chandler. But not here; not now. On this November morning, Morgan felt he had hardly begun to know the man. Geoff Barrows had recently asked him: “What’s your sense of him these days?” “Still as something very large.” “Such as?” “A many-roomed mansion glimpsed from a distance by a passenger in a speeding car.”
Since the firm’s beginning, Nicholas (“Nick”) Kissel had headed its Trusts and Estates department. In legal jargon, he was what is called a “belt and suspenders lawyer,” which is to say very careful; prudent; stubborn about being sure. A deep memory and longer than an elephant’s. Quiet. He never unsheathed his legal dagger unless driven to, and when he did, watch out. Now seventy years old (and not in the best of health), he was due to retire at the end of this year, 1947, and it was Morgan whom he and Roger Chandler had chosen to take over the T and E department (official date of enthronement January 1, 1948).
On one wall of Nick Kissel’s office was a large topographical map of the rich mass of land that lies between Cleveland and Pittsburgh. “America’s Ruhr valley,” Nick Kissel called it. Or, alternately: “The cradle of America’s economic power.” He would go on, gonging up the names of John and Andrew and Henry. John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick, that is, to mention but three of the original makers of fortunes wrested from the map’s depicted terrain. Most of the original “making” group of such vast fortunes as these were now all dead, but their main-tree, many-branched descendants were very much alive and very much in evidence, some of them Kissel, Chandler clients: “Up to you, Morgan, to keep them with the firm.” Toward which end, over the last sixteen months, Nick Kissel had spent a great deal of time with Morgan in the study of client files, “backgrounding” him in family histories, confiding to him the individual temperaments of clan members (and their in-laws)—varied temperaments—that made for such current cases as (in one steep instance) a will contest; in another, a child-custody fight; in another instance, a defamation suit brought by one sibling against another. Endless—the fateful human equations and quagmires that require the law’s protection.
By now, Morgan had met and come to know for himself a majority of the firm’s T and E clients, a surprising number of whom no longer lived in Cleveland but in New York City. To better serve this latter group, he had sought and gained admittance to practice in New York State, and so these days was often to be found in the Kissel, Chandler New York office: location 120 Broadway—where, from his desk on the thirtieth floor, he had a reach of view t
hat soared like a gull above the tip-end of lower Manhattan out and over the great nautical commotions happening on the harbor waters (commotions that distance made casual), beyond, to the heaven-raised, torch-holding hand of the Statue of Liberty.
…“Up to you, Morgan, to keep improving the way the department functions,” was one of Nick Kissel’s exhortations. Another: “Up to you, Morgan, to bring a new generation of clients to it.” “Up to you, Morgan, to keep its reputation shining.” ETC. And his obsessive last words: “As long as you stay focused and run scared, you’ll do just fine.”
In November of 1947, was Morgan running scared? You bet. And—as he had recently told Geoff Barrows—“thrilled shitless to be.”
Two years before, when he was just home from the war, Maud had remounted her campaign against Julia’s calling him by his name. For the campaign he had little heart, and told Maud so. “You won’t, though, interfere with my efforts?” Maud had asked. No, he had answered, he wouldn’t; qualifying: “Let’s agree to keep an open mind about it. All right?” They were too immensely happy to quarrel over it. Not that their happiness reconciled their differences, only that, as to their differences, their happiness kept them honest. So, in the daylight, on her own, Maud pushed her cause along, gently, ever gently; persistently. It became something to see, Julia’s child’s mind from moment to moment working at remembering to call him “Daddy”—but at every instance of her young life that was brilliant, forgetting.
“Look, Morgan”—at the breathtaking descent of a falling star.
“Morganmorganmorgan, watch me do it!”—on the evening of the day she mastered riding her kid-dinky, two-wheel bike.
“Caught you, Morgan”—during a snowy game of Fox-and-Geese, and on the black ice of the frozen pond during a contest of Slide Simon: “Morgan! Wow!”
The campaign only lasted about three months. It ended abruptly, in the following way: at breakfast one morning he somehow, by some maladroit move, knocked over his full glass of orange juice and his cup of coffee, himself immediately transfixed by what he had done, and Maud and Caroline immobilized too, just sitting dumbfounded in their chairs (disgrace—the judgment in Caroline’s wide eyes) silent and staring at the mess of the flooded table and at his shirt splattered of Halloween colors, orange and black, and at the disgusting affair of his drenched pants. Not Julia, though—her arms flung out to him in impulsive sympathy, and her voice too, keening for him: “Morgan! Poor, poor dear Morgan.”
God, how he loved her!
A few minutes later, after the mess had been dealt with and he was back upstairs changing his clothes, Maud came into their bedroom and all in a hurry threw up her hands and called out: “Morgan, I give up!” When she did this—that is to say, as it was for two seconds actually happening—in the way she flung up her hands and in the way her voice sounded, he saw and heard Julia. And in that flash of time understood why Julia called him “Morgan.” Because Maud did. Maud: her mother: her example. “I give up—” Maud had said again, this time laughing. “It’s fixed in her to call you by your name. I’ll never forget it, the way it just—came out. ‘Morgan. Poor, poor dear Morgan.’ Her lovely pity for you.”
He stood there in his gartered socks and his Brooks Brothers underwear, and began to speak, stumbling to find the words for his discovery that so much of herself—what she was—had found its way into Julia, and that someday Julia might have a daughter who would be in great part: “you,” he finished.
As a sensation, this marvelous glimpse of Maud immortal filled his eyes with tears.
It had begun to rain.
Of the several knobs on the dashboard panel, which was the one that controlled the windshield wipers? Ah. That one.
He was driving his new car. A Buick. He hadn’t fully made friends with it yet. Nor it, he thought, with him. But what can you expect of a relationship that’s only ten days old? Which was how long he had had the Buick—picked up from the General Motors dealer the Friday before Mrs. Leigh’s death.
At war’s end, it had taken a while for industry to “tool down” from turning out combat material and “tool up” for turning out products for peacetime use. Things. All kinds of things that had worn out or fallen apart and that were considered to be necessities: lawnmowers and toasters and vacuum cleaners and stoves and farm tractors and refrigerators and cars and clocks; and other things that weren’t, strictly speaking, necessities, but which were wanted: new radios and new phonographs and new watches and new cameras (all fancier than ever before). Suddenly, or so it seemed, things were again on the market, again available, making of everyone a sudden purchaser. “America’s new consumerism” was how economists dubbed the mania. Virtually forgotten, the austerities and deprivations of the wartime years. Nowadays when people came together, conversation hinged less and less on memory and more and more on things and future plans. Nationwide, there was a feeling of kick in the air. Like such new-fangled gadgets as electric eggbeaters and electric can-openers, the word—upbeat—had been invented.
…Maud had a new car too, a Plymouth station wagon, purchased last August. And Miss Sly, finally, a new refrigerator. She had told him about it when they’d met a couple of weeks ago for one of their occasional lunches. “It’s completely wonderful, Mr. Shurtliff! The motor purrs like a kitten and the interior’s a robin’s egg blue. And so roomy; the shelves so well organized.” She had caught herself at her rapture, and laughed in a way that sent the precariously done-up clump of her hair-bun rocking. “It’s ludicrous to be so thrilled by such a thing as a refrigerator! What has happened to me?”
He had looked at her—he always enjoyed looking at her—and laughed with her and told her that in a couple of days he was going to pick up his own new car. This Buick. “How exciting! What color?” “Hunter green.” Then he told her that he intended to keep the Harold Teen, put it out to pasture, so to say, and take very good care of it, and let Time make of it a vintage car which, someday, Caroline and Julia might like to lark about in.
…Driving along in the November rain, it came to him as a realization that of all the people he knew and was close to, Miss Sly was the one he would be most intimately able to talk to about Mrs. Leigh’s life and death. With her, there would be (in legal jargon) no conflict of interest, and from her, the balm of impersonal aspect.
She was his secret life.
Her name had come up soon after he’d returned home from the war. “I expect to see her from time to time,” he had told Maud. Maud had firmly distanced herself: “Just don’t tell me when you do, Morgan. I don’t want to know.” (Ah, he had accepted: so be it.)
…At some point today, he would telephone her and arrange to have lunch with her next week. He would tell her, then, about Mrs. Leigh, and in that remaining way of hers, she would listen, her eyes on him, but seeing through him, past him, in fixed regard of the great scene: of its extent—some of it in sunlight and some of it in the shadow of clouds, and the overhead air alive with imagined swallows in flight.
Yes. What he needed was to have lunch with her: to be seated near her in the tranquil vicinity of her large perspective.
“We will,” they told each other when he was first back from the war; when they still couldn’t get enough of each other; couldn’t, when they were alone and not making love, stop talking about the future and what they intended to do with it, projecting themselves into it, but softly—tossed by bliss and gratification. Plenty of time.
“We really should.” Spoken at full float about six months later.
“We’ve got to.” Said with feet on the ground, about five months after the six months.
“God, we absolutely must!” Exploded three months after the five months that had followed the six months. Add it up: over a year. Ah, the stages of action, from poetic contemplation to unholy desperation.
“Must.” MOVE.
Just glance around, starting with the twins’ room—the floor covered wall-to-wall with their jealously guarded possessions, nowhere to walk but on the c
eiling. Maud with no quiet, private place to call her own. His study cyclonic, heaped with books and papers. Tessa’s theme: “Don’t be in here”—meaning her now too small kitchen. Every closet jammed full of everybody’s stuff (“Mine!”). How had it come to be that all of them (Ralph included) seemed suddenly to take up so much space, and in ways all-directional, like tomato plants gone rampant in August?
The previous winter, to help them find their new home, they had sought out an elderly real-estate agent named F. Rodney Fuller. “He’s odd, extremely odd,” a friend told them, “but he knows all the worthwhile properties in the region, and once he gets the scent of what you want, he won’t stop until he’s dogged it down for you.”
So they met with Mr. Fuller. He sat bolt upright in a soft chair in their living room, combing a scraggly goat’s beard with the long fingers of a freckled hand, his right eye focused on them, but his left eye its own master, veering off, nearly out of its socket, in a westerly direction. “Tell me your priorities, Mr. and Mrs. Shurtliff,” he said in the unestablished voice of a teenage choirboy.
To remain, they told him, in this loved region of the Chagrin River Valley, within a ten-to-twelve-mile radius of Hatherton. The house to be commodious and a good example of whatever architectural style it purported to represent. And land: they must have enough land to roam over and, if possible, either a spring-fed pond or a year-round active creek running through the property. “Is that all too general?” Morgan asked.
“No,” Mr. Fuller replied. “It gives me scope. I like scope…. Now, about the way I work. I’m not one for dragging my clients here, there, and everywhere to look at places just for the sake of looking. You’ll not hear from me until I’ve found something worthwhile for you to see. It will likely take a while. If you can’t be patient—”
Matters of Chance Page 24
