It was just then that, in contrast to Maud’s poise, he became conscious of Miss Sly’s lack thereof, intuiting it (he knew her that well); just then that he realized that for her, this meeting was in some way a difficult one: one she would have wished to avoid. His intuition took on additional proof as he saw the eager way she picked up on Caroline’s unexpectedly offered next words: “We’re going on to the Russian Tea Room,” was what Caroline said, sounding adolescently grand and a bit actressy, Miss Sly lighting on the information: “What a treat! If I had the prospect of caviar before me, I’d be positively sprinting toward it! So please, you must all hurry along, not allow me to detain you an instant longer.” She looked from Caroline’s face to Julia’s, to Maud’s, to his: “Now, there you go! So nice to see you again, Mrs. Shurtliff, and to meet your children—” shooing them off with such a humorous, lofty, lively sweep of her hand and arm that Maud laughed, and the twins too, murmuring their good-byes as they passed into the aisle and up it, moving easily now that the crowd had thinned, Morgan this time bringing up the rear—not, though, until he’d touched Miss Sly’s hand (her hand, with a tacit warmth, briefly placed on top of his).
As he passed Miss Sly’s waiting, watching friend, a smile flashed between them, rich in accord—Ah, WE knew, didn’t we, that Miss Sly would take charge of the scene and conclude it her way: and isn’t she wonderful, strangely wonderful, completely wonderful. That was the message that passed between them, and so perfectly that he paused, then, there in the aisle, near the woman, just long enough to raise his hand to his forehead and, in a way, to salute her. But something about his gesture, something, something perhaps that struck her as being in some way too physical, caused her to suddenly, deeply, femininely blush, and as suddenly, to look terribly shy. That was what remained so vividly in his memory of her: that look of sudden, extreme shyness which had so swiftly overwhelmed the brilliance of her smile.
(It would be four years before he would see her again. Four years before Miss Sly would reintroduce him to her. Sylvia Phelps was her name.)
Out on Fifty-seventh Street, Julia asked him: “That lady, Morgan, the one with the comb in her hair—who is she?”
Julia’s question raised in his mind the parenthetical fact that a few weeks before he returned home from the war, it had fallen on Maud’s shoulders to tell the twins that they were adopted. She had hoped to delay telling them until he would be with her, but a boy at nursery school, Brian Ashley, had prematurely forced the issue. “Your dad and mom aren’t your real dad and mom,” Brian had hammered into the twins’ ears: “I know they aren’t,” he’d hammered on, “because I heard my mom tell my dad that they aren’t.” Ya-ya-ya. Supervising that morning’s nursery school play period was nice, astute Miss Baxter, who heard Brian’s taunt and had the sense to telephone Maud and tell her what had happened: “I was sure you’d want to know, Mrs. Shurtliff. Caroline seemed quite upset.” Then Miss Baxter had laughed: “I guess I ought to tell you too that Julia kicked Brian.” Maud said: “You mean Caroline kicked him.” Miss Baxter said: “No, Julia did. It surprised me too, Julia as a kicker. I made light of it—sent Brian off to play with Georgie Fowler. I’m sure the twins will tell you all about the episode.” As predicted by Miss Baxter, they did. Or rather, Caroline did, at noon-time, when Maud picked her and Julia up at school. Caroline threw herself onto the car’s front seat and at once repeated what Brian had said, and: “What did he mean?” she had asked Maud, and with a greater vehemence, repeated: “What did he mean?”
Morgan had never asked Maud to try to reconstruct the exact words she had used to answer Caroline’s question, Julia sitting there too, waiting to hear. He had never asked because by the time he returned home from the war, there had been no reason to—the results of her answer were so in place, so fully, wholesomely established: in the twins’ five-year-old minds, “adopted” was a marvelous thing to be: chosen was the great word: marvelous to have been chosen: in all the world and from so many other babies, chosen to be loved, loved so much, so much: all along the way, loved so much. That the twins thought so, that they felt so, was Maud’s achievement, her victory, won on that long-ago day when he was paternally absent, still away at war, when, on her own, she had established love as adoption’s base, and so well, so perfectly, that as the twins had grown older and up into a full understanding of what “adopted” technically means, the two words they had been overheard to apply about adoption (whenever the topic came up, which it inevitably did every once in the odd while) were “chosen” (they were) and “love” (in the present, every unquestioned, ever enduring tense).
(“That lady, Morgan, the one with the comb in her hair, who is she?”)…The four of them were walking close together, arms linked, so Maud heard Julia’s question; Caroline, too; and although Julia had put her question to him, he knew that Maud would prefer to answer it, to at least be given the chance to set the tone of an answer. He glanced at Maud. Her head was turned toward him. He smiled, and she took the lead, addressing Julia: “She’s an old acquaintance,” she said. “We met her years ago, soon after you were born. I haven’t seen her since. She hasn’t changed a bit, looks exactly the way she did way back then.”
Morgan said: “There’s a Latin phrase that best describes her. Sui generis. It means thoroughly unusual—unlike anything or anyone else.”
Immediately, Maud said: “It was nice to see her again.” She said it in a firm way that conveyed sincerity, while at the same time implying that there really wasn’t anything more to be said—and anyhow, they were now under the red awning that marked the entrance to the Russian Tea Room. Caroline said: “This is so exciting!” Julia stepped aside, and Caroline too, deferentially, and Maud, smiling, moved forward: the first of them to go through the revolving door.
…Albert Einstein died on the eighteenth of April (a Monday) and on that same day Ralph fooled around with a porcupine and ended up the loser. He returned home, howling, from a solo walk in the woods. Dennis heard him. (Maud was in town attending the Hatherton Library monthly Board of Trustees meeting.) Later in the day Dennis told her how Ralph had come running, announcing his troubles by his howls; how he’d sat down outside the kitchen door “yawping,” Dennis said, “like a baby. His face looked like a dress-maker’s pincushion.” Dennis took him to the vet and brought him back about three hours later, “quill free.” But he was an awful sight, pathetic, with his fine muzzle all swollen out of shape, its whiteness (in age he was by now nearly thirteen years old) painted over with Mercurochrome and the rims of his blood-shot eyes phlegmy from the drain-off of his woeful adventure. Julia and Caroline and Morgan and Maud fussed over him mightily that evening, petting and hugging him, promising him he’d feel better tomorrow, all the time, on the television, pictures of Einstein were being shown, and a running narration going on about his life and work; his genius. (Which is why, ever since that evening, whenever Morgan thinks of Ralph, remembering him, he thinks of Einstein. And the other way around: whenever Einstein’s name comes up, he thinks of Ralph.)
…Consider for a moment the long reach in everyone’s life of what happened down in Montgomery, Alabama, in December of ’55: of a seated woman—Rosa Parks was her name—riding on a public bus: of her refusal to give up her seat to a white man: of how her refusal had the effect of opening a pair of stage curtains—old opaque heavy-hanging reeking long-closed drapery pulled apart—revealing at stage center a talented, well-rehearsed other man, ready to speak: Martin Luther King, Junior. (What a name!) And so began the epic drama of the civil rights movement. Soon, throughout the land, a citizen cast of untold thousands would augment the ranks of the initial players.
(Ah… A last recall about 1955: Lolita. Vladimir Nabokov’s sprung creation. Oh the number of doomsday folk who whispered the name as if they dared not voice it aloud, as if it were a highly contagious, killer virus.)
Maud dubbed 1956—“Alan Litt’s year!” In February, the premiere performance of his first symphony was conducted by Bruno Walter
. Sitting with Alan in Carnegie Hall on that memorable evening were Geoff and Alan’s sister, Gwen, and Maud and Morgan. The preperformance atmosphere was not lacking in electricity. Luminaries from the music world were present in force. So were the critics.
The symphony’s first movement was a tightly wrought, exuberant Allegro con brio; the second movement an amiable Poco allegretto. In a break from traditional symphonic structure, the third, final movement was a stately Andante that began ethereally, pianissimo, and built to a climax more intense than loud, and from that sheer extreme receded like a great abating sigh back to pianissimo. The cellos sounded the movement’s last phrase and held its last note to the end of its aural life.
Silence.
And then the applause began, and gained, and from the podium Bruno Walter waved his arms in the direction of Alan’s seat, hailing Alan to rise and come forward, and Alan, quickly, just before he obeyed the command, embraced Geoff, and kissed Gwen and Maud, and by a stretch, clenched Morgan’s hand, and then was gone, into the aisle, lithe, moving stageward almost at a run through the applause. (So he never saw the look on Maud’s face of awe and admiration, but Morgan did, and in memory, always would.)…In March, again in New York (at Town Hall), the Hapsburg Quartet premiered Alan’s Third Quartet in G-minor. (“Mozart’s key, temporarily loaned to me,” Alan said.)…And in April, Alan was the recipient of the Arthur Haezler Award (given every five years to an American composer), and in April, too, he was awarded the Rattigan Prize (of twenty-five thousand dollars). “Alan’s year,” Maud said: “All his stars in place!”
…Not so for Lucy Blackett. Her long affair with Gerry Davis, begun in war-torn London in 1944, came to an end these twelve years later. In recent months, their meetings had become hasty ones, single hours, seized by Gerry from the demands of his successful career as an architect, and from his family—(his two children, whom he “loved,” and his wife, whom he “liked”). He had the capacity for that kind of lethal honesty, and Lucy, for so long a time, the lethal capacity to accept it. Until she woke one morning and, to herself defined what, in Gerry’s life, she felt she had come to be: no longer Gerry’s companion-lover, but the obliging frail of another woman’s husband. That was the way she put it to Maud, blaming only herself for her misery. So she closed the door on their long relationship. Quietly. No scene. And Gerry bowed and went away.
For Lucy, for a harsh while, the void of his departure seemed more than she could bear. Maud saved her. Morgan watched her do it. Again and again she boarded the train to New York, staying with Lucy sometimes for only a day, sometimes for two days, once for nearly a week. “For however long Luce wants me with her, I’ll stay”: that was Maud’s theme, said with variations, over and over.
Slowly, Lucy regained her footing…. In late autumn, Maud (just back from yet another trip to New York), told Morgan: “I’m sure she’s all right now.” Then she began to weep.
Tears of relief, Morgan thought, and said so.
“No,” Maud shook her head.
“Then why are you crying?”
“Because,” Maud sobbed: “Because I know her. Because I know she’ll never look at another man.”
…“My first glory case,” Morgan always (afterwards) called it.
For sixteen months—from September of 1956 to January of 1958—it virtually took over his life.
The crux of the case can be quickly summed:
> At threat were the interest(s) of two adopted (male) children in a long-established family trust valued at millions of dollars.
> The children had been adopted as infants by the granddaughter of the grantor (founder) of the trust. > The terms of the trust provided that upon the death of the said granddaughter, the trust would terminate and the principal be distributed to the said grand-daughter’s children: “To her issue, then living, per stirpes,” and “if there be no such issue”—the principal would pass to a charity named in the trust.
Those were the stated conditions of the trust, the background, so to speak, of the case, the action of which commenced at the time of the grand-daughter’s death, in February of 1956.
Immediately following the grand-daughter’s death, the named charity made its claim in the Surrogate’s Court of New York County that at the time the trust was drawn (so many years ago) the phrase—“issue, then living, per stirpes”—would not have applied to adopted children: that, therefore, the principal of the trust should be paid to the charity rather than to the adopted children.
Thus the matter, as a case, came into being.
Now as to the action: in September of 1956, the two adopted children—by now prominent adult men aged thirty-three and thirty-one—retained Morgan to represent and protect their interest(s) in the trust.
At this point, it is necessary to say that the founder (grantor) of the trust had been in his time a famous man of the achieving kind people spoke of, back in those days, as “an all-American Horatio Alger type.” (Hence a great captivator of the public’s imagination.) So while he was still alive, he had been the subject of countless newspaper articles and interviews, even of several full-blown biographies, in all of which available material (supplemented by private family papers provided him by his clients) Morgan, for two months, immersed himself for the purpose of re-creating the man’s personality and character—his attitudes and motivations and habits, his sympathies, his bearings and loyalties in relation to family members and friends, his societal concerns, his humanity—which vivid re-creation became a body of evidence sufficient, as Morgan argued it, to persuade the Surrogate’s Court that such a man would not—not—have excluded adopted children as inheritors of his bounty.
Inevitably, the charity appealed the Surrogate’s Court’s determination to the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court of the State of New York, before which court Morgan re-argued his case with a skill (again) powerful enough to persuade the Appellate Court to unanimously affirm the Surrogate’s Court’s earlier determination.
In a desperate, last-ditch move, the charity sought leave to appeal the issue to the Court of Appeals of the State of New York….
…It is a fact that, except for a murder trial, nothing attracts the public’s and the news media’s attention faster than a courtroom battle involving immense sums of money. So from that day in September of 1956 when Morgan became one of the key figures in just such a battle, to the day sixteen months later, in January of 1958, when the case was concluded, his name appeared often in print, in press and magazine accounts of the battle’s on-going action, and of course, throughout the proceedings, in various law journals. So when he emerged the victor in the case, there was a further, concentrated spate of publicity about him; and so he experienced, and briefly enjoyed, a momentary “fame.” (“A fame of the Andy Warhol brand,” he would say of it, laughing, twenty years later.)
The brief duration of his “public” fame aside, the case secured his name in the legal world. Carved it, so to say, in stone. And, far from incidentally, advanced to greater heights the already stellar reputation of the Kissel, Chandler firm.
Throughout most of 1957, he spent an average of fourteen workdays of every month in New York. Had to, because as the case advanced from one phase to the next, each new adversative move required of him that he rethink his plea: reposition it; refortify it; in a sense, redecide it. To the solitary hours spent in such review, many additional hours were spent in conference with the two associates engaged in the dig-work of continuous research and in the writing of preliminary drafts of new briefs. So of necessity he became what he called “a long-ride weekly commuter,” Cleveland-to-New York and back. Usually, he left Cleveland on Sunday evening, making the overnight journey by Pullman train, then reversing the journey from New York on Wednesday night, arriving back in Cleveland on Thursday morning. Once in a while, if he had to remain in New York on a Thursday, he made the trip by plane. In New York, the place he called “home” was the Stuyvesant Club. There he slept and ate breakfast and at day’s end ate dinner and w
ent again early to bed and rose early the next morning and breakfasted and from the club went again to his office. In the physical comforts of good food, good service and a well-appointed bedroom, the Stuyvesant afforded a posh existence. But there the ease ended, snuffed out by the demands of work—demands that made of his life a disciplined, routine affair vaguely reminiscent of his wartime years aboard ship, the oddest resemblance being the sudden way he would at times wake in a dead-of-night sweat, alert, feeling threatened. Such times always coincided with a fresh worry about the case, with running scared in relation to it, as on the Stubbins, on a new stretch of new sea that posed new dangers. In an effort to get back to sleep, he would reinvoke Miss Sly’s old incantation: One good hen, two ducks, three cackling geese, four—
…So of course, one way or another, he would often end up thinking about Miss Sly and himself and of their strangely intimate, formal friendship, and of how he could never quite rid himself of the feeling, about their friendship, that it was ordained. Certainly it was a fact that by 1957 they were seeing more of each other than ever before. They met for lunch at least twice a month. Once, (he couldn’t afterwards reconstruct just how the moment had come about) they admitted to one another that they “counted” on being together every couple of weeks, that being together “made a difference.” They didn’t pursue—as a subject—exactly what the difference was that being together made, and surely never, ever did they speak of their mutual awareness of their ever-increasing closeness.
It never ceased to fascinate him that prior to that 1955 encounter in Carnegie Hall when Miss Sly saw and met the twins as fifteen-year-old girls, she had never permitted him to talk with her about them. By a staying look or gesture, she had steadfastly quashed his attempts. But after that encounter, starting immediately thereafter, she had taken the lead in bringing up their names (the first time with an openness that bordered on display), and ever since, and ever more avidly, had retained the lead.
Matters of Chance Page 30
