KISSEL, CHANDLER, SHURTLIFF & COLT
Before Maud died, back in early February, Morgan had told George Colt he thought the time was “ripe” for making the New York office a more “important” part of the Kissel, Chandler practice. The Cleveland office, long established and high in repute, was zinging along on greased tracks. Ditto the Pittsburgh branch. “But I’ve got this idea, George, that we ought to expand the New York office—turn it into a real contender, equal to the best of existing New York firms.”
George Colt listened hard to Morgan’s idea, then rocked back in his chair and looked for a long moment out the window, smiling, as if the stone facade of the building across the avenue were a pleasing, living sight—a great, green, unfolding, unfenced field—his smile sort of dreamy. Morgan knew what, about his idea, was floating through George Colt’s mind: that it was very ambitious, very, for the reason of its unprecedented reach, very daring.
(“Bear in mind,” Morgan would tell a later generation of lawyers, “this was back in 1958. Back when law firms were still small in size, referred to within the profession as ‘shops.’ Back to a time when, within the unit of a given firm, partner relationships were close pacts of balanced trust, deemed, like marriages, almost sacred.” He would go on to say that the Kissel, Chandler firm, back in 1958, was ranked as being large, consisting as it did of twenty-five lawyers, ten of whom were partners, fifteen of whom were associates. “Minuscule by today’s standards,” he would add, elaborating further that it wasn’t until sometime in the 1970s—with the proliferation of government agencies and statutory regulations and ever-changing tax policies (as plaguing to individual citizens as to corporations)—that law firms began to become the huge behemoths they are today, with hundreds of partners and hundreds of associates and subsidiary offices scattered all over the world).
Finally, George Colt withdrew his gaze from the building’s facade across the avenue. He looked now at Morgan. Then, still smiling, though not in his previous dreamy way, he verbally served up his idea of Morgan’s idea. He said that it was “dicey,” but worthy of consideration; a matter to be put before the firm’s entire partnership. “You’d be the one to front it, Morgan. You’ve got the clout, what with your recent big win and all.”
“Ah George, bless you! That’s exactly what I’d hoped you’d say.”
“It’d be a big undertaking. You’d have to spend most of your time in New York; keep on being a long-distance commuter. How would that sit with Maud?”
“So well that, pending approval of the idea, she’s begun to talk about our getting a small apartment in New York. A snuggery, just for the two of us. And why not? With Julia and Caroline off at college, she’s free to spend time away from home. She has close friends in New York—”
“So for both of you, it would be okay,” George Colt cut in—
“Better than just okay,” Morgan shot back.
“Grand…We’ll put it to the others at the next partners’ meeting. We ought all to be in accord: that way, if the project fails it’ll be on all our shoulders.”
“It won’t fail.”
“It damn well better not!”
…But then everything changed. Maud died. And Morgan shelved the idea. Couldn’t rise to the challenge of it. Not until now, nearly eight months later, in the wake of that crisis week-end perpetrated by his father. Now—as a possible salvation—he took up the idea again.
George Colt’s response? “I knew you would, Morgan, given time. I’ve already talked it over with the others. We’re all for it.”
So, starting in November, he began (on paper) to give body to his idea, to plot its course and ready it for launching—a chanceful sink-or-float thing, maybe personally murderous. His nights to come would be sleepless, but a sleeplessness wholly different from the aching, despairing wakefulness of sorrow. Now his pride was involved. (That line of Shakespeare’s: “…he might yet recover, and prove an ass.” His recovery, were it to come at all, to be proved—not—an ass).
There was the mounting dread of the first Christmas without Maud.
Again, Letitia Grant took up the cudgel, this time on Julia’s and Caroline’s behalf. She would make it her business, she said, to see that they didn’t spend their Christmas holidays grieving for their mother. Maud, she said, would roll in her grave at the very thought of such prolonged mourning. “They’ll have had their eyes glued in books since last September, Morgan. They’ll have earned some fun. And they are eighteen! Maud had it in mind to give a Christmas dance in their honor…. Oh, I agree! A big affair would be inappropriate. But a pretty, spanky, reasonably small tea-dance would be perfectly seemly. Leave it to me.”
At the Grants’ house, on Saturday, December 20, in a winterized, barber-pole-striped tent set up off the living room, amid potted greenery and flowers galore, the young crowd danced. So did their parents; so did their white-haired parents’ parents, Doctor Leigh and Ansel Shurtliff among them. Trust Letitia to have hired a terrific band—not a blaring one, but plenty lively: what Caroline called “romantic hip.”
He danced four times, first with Julia, then with Caroline, then, as everyone looked on, with both of them, encircling them with his arms, somehow waltzing, honoring them that way, that they were eighteen, “debs,” being formally “brought out” (Letitia’s words). Last of all, as everyone took to the floor, he danced with Letitia. He remained of course at the party; stayed on until it ended, but only as a paternal, viewing presence, docked on the sidelines, not faking the pleasure he took in the affair, but not lost in it either. Somewhere in between. Between felicity and sorrow.
Geoff had come from New York for this occasion of the twins’ “debut.” He said it wasn’t to be missed, Caroline being his goddaughter and Julia his next, best-loved girl. He brought them presents: matched Tiffany sapphire bar-pins: “commemorative tokens.” In the swell of laughter and movement and music, as the party neared its peak, he sidled up to Morgan: “Are you all right, Morgie?” he asked, knowing.
“I think so, Geoff.”
They stood together, watching the action. “That lorn maiden,” Geoff said after a bit, nodding in the direction of a limp-haired, sad-faced, unattended girl.
“Helen Mayhew,” Morgan supplied her name.
“She needs some seeing to,” Geoff said. “I’ll give her a whirl.”
“A bloody saint is what you are.”
Geoff laughed. “Hardly. Just a well brought-up ex-Philadelphian.” Then: “Hang on, Morgie.”
With which words, Geoff left him. He saw the gentle way Geoff touched Helen Mayhew’s arm, then took her by the hand and led her onto the dance floor. The band was playing “That Old Black Magic.” (Look, Maud. Look how Geoff is succeeding at giving Godfrey Mayhew’s daughter a good time. Look at her smile! Ah, Maud.)
With a seeming usualness, the dreaded holidays passed. Even the weather behaved in a seasonably usual way, producing two snowstorms, gale winds, cold days and colder nights. The telephone rang a lot, and the front doorbell. Caroline and Julia (Caroline more than Julia) went to parties. Their friends (all home from different colleges for the holidays) came by during the day to hike in the woods or to skate on the pond’s black ice (the males played raucous games of hockey) or just to sit around indoors, talking and laughing—Caroline’s crowd noisy, confident, demonstrative; Julia’s smaller group quieter, far less overtly excitable. (Bruce Wilson, now in his junior year at Columbia, and more than ever intellectually serious, came often, very often, Morgan noted, to see Julia, bringing his springer spaniel, Pansy, with him. “I hope you don’t mind Pansy, Mr. Shurtliff,” Bruce said. “Mind, Bruce? It’s wonderful having a dog in the house again. Pansy’s welcome anytime.”) This differently geared mix of friends came together too on several evenings that began with dinner and ended late; more talk, more laughter, all (as Morgan heard it) as usual. He kept telling himself that it was the resiliency of Caroline’s and Julia’s youth that enabled them to be—usual. As if Maud were still alive. For this ability, for them, he was
thankful…. But on the day they returned to college, an episode took place that made a lie of his assumptions about their easy-seeming, all-as-usual behavior. It happened at the airport as the three of them waited together for the flight to be called. Not a long wait. All passengers traveling on Flight 303 to Philadelphia should now proceed to gate five. “Gate five is that way,” Morgan said, starting to herd them—
Abruptly, Caroline grabbed one of his arms and one of Julia’s: “Wait,” she said, holding them in place: “There’s something I want to say.”
“What.” Julia demanded.
“That we’ve made it through,” Caroline began, fiercely, her lips, though, trembling: “There were times when I was afraid we wouldn’t”—tears were in her eyes now—“when I thought we wouldn’t be able to.”
And Julia, ardent—an instant twin such as he had not seen her for some while to be—said: “But we did. The three of us. Somehow we made it through.”
He looked at them, unable to speak. They had one face, one selfsame, sorrow-riddled, victorious face.
All passengers…The second announcement came, imperative.
He was a statue.
They kissed him and picked up their hand luggage and turned from him and commenced walking toward gate five.
He watched them go; watched them go. Until he came alive, and able to—finally able to—he called after them: “I’ll see you in New York soon. I’ll arrange it.”
They heard and looked over their shoulders back at him and smiled, then moved on, almost running forward.
It took him a considerable time—he was still that struck, still within himself that humbled—to simply proceed.
From the airport he went into the city, to his office. He would work at his desk for the rest of the day. He was taking Miss Sly to dinner that evening. It would be their first meeting in this New Year of 1959.
In early January he was officially installed as the head of the New York branch of Kissel, Chandler, Shurtliff & Colt. (Branch was his orchardist father’s word.)
Later in the month, after a careful search, he bought an apartment in a building located at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Seventy-third Street. It was of considerable size, consisting of a long, gallery-like entrance hall, living room, dining room, library, four bedrooms, kitchen, and maid’s room. In the first week in February, a decorator (recommended by Lucy Blackett) went to work, supervising painters, measuring windows for curtaining, ETC. ETC. In his spare time, he began to furnish the apartment, aided by Julia and Caroline when they came to New York for stray weekends away from college. “Our New York home,” Julia said of the apartment. Caroline, employing her favorite adjective, said: “Fabulous! It’s going to be fabulous!”
To his very great surprise, the thought kept occurring to him that at some future time (and most certainly if the venture of the New York office proved successful) he would give up the glorious house he and Maud had committed to back in 1947, eleven years ago, now ghostly. He shared this thought with no one.
Friday, February 20, 1959
A year to the day of Maud’s death.
For this day, he returned to Hatherton.
Camellias are my favorite flowers, Maud always said…. A long time ago, with Dennis’s help, she had planted six camellia bushes at one end of the old greenhouse. Warmly bedded and well tended, the bushes had flourished. Annually, beginning in early February, the bushes bloomed, the flowers white and cool. Beautiful. So beautiful. He got up early in the morning and went to the greenhouse and clipped from the bushes a few of the flowers and, still in the near-dark of the barely-born day, drove to the cemetery. There, he laid the flowers on her grave. Overhead, through filaments of gauzy gray clouds, the sun was struggling to show itself. He stayed beside the grave, looking up at the sky, watching the sun’s attempt, witnessing its determination. And all at once—astonishing—it parted the clouds and blazed, a scheming, golden orb, and he thought that right before his eyes, all in a second, a whole year had passed. That the eclipse was over.
Light, then.
A force of nature!
Part Two
1 Prologue
What’s past is prologue.
—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, THE TEMPEST
It is mid-April, the spring of 1959.
At the end of this workday, he is taking a walk in Central Park. On one of the park’s small, man-made lakes a pair of ducks are swimming, creating vees on the water’s surface. He stops walking and stands still, watching them. He sings a song to himself. Flow gently, sweet Afton, among thy green braes. It was one of the songs he sang as a boy in school, in the fifth grade…. He hasn’t thought of the song for years. Why now does he remember it, singing it to himself? In the lake there are no reeds growing, no meander of water as with a stream’s flow. It is the presence of the swimming ducks that reminds him of the absence of reeds and that the lake’s water is contained. Yet there the ducks are, happily swimming, not looking at all compromised…. Then a man comes along. Like himself, the man is dressed in a suit and tie, out for a walk at the end of the day, wearing a hat. A well-groomed yellow Labrador retriever trots at the man’s side. The dog sees the ducks and begins to bark and leap, straining at its leash. The ducks flap their wings and paddle forward, skimming along, all commotion, half in and half out of the water, then rise up quacking into the air and fly away. The man smiles at Morgan; Morgan returns his smile. Man and dog walk on. But Morgan lingers, not minding that the ducks are gone…. Now the farther scene engages him—the rise of the hill on the other side of the lake, glimpses of the tops of buildings crowned by clouds pinkened by the setting sun. He stands there, greatly taken by the scene, conscious that his enjoyment of it is due in large part to his anticipation of the evening soon to come. He looks at his watch. Time to go. Don’t be later than six, Ann had said. He strides off, liking the feel of being in a hurry.
Ann Montgomery.
He met her about a month ago at a dinner party given by Pamela and Lawrence. When Pam invited him to the party, she described it as “a duty party, Morgan—people we don’t often see but owe an evening to. I need an extra man. Will you do me the favor of coming?” At table, seated on his right, was Ann Montgomery. By the time dinner was over he knew he would end the night with her, making love to her. She paved the way, she told him so many certain facts about herself: that she’d been twice married and twice divorced, that what she’d never do was marry again, that she really liked being single, going to parties alone, getting to know new people. “On my own terms,” she’d quickly added, laughing. She and Pamela had been in the same class at Vassar. “Vassar’s our connection,” Ann said: “We meet a couple of times a year, usually over the matter of fund-raising.” The last time they’d met, Ann had paid for lunch: “It’s sweet of Pam to have me to dinner in return for a mere lunch.” She had asked him if he was married. He had answered with a simple no. She talked on, luring him with her chatter, her independence, her shady humor. Her laughter was infectious, a sort of musical hum. There seemed to be no rancor in her. All through dinner she kept glancing at his hands. When the party was over, he offered to take her home. In the taxi, curbside at her apartment building, when she asked him if he would like to “bed” her, he said yes, looking right at her, yes he would.
It was the first time since Maud’s death. A turning point.
Ann works for a publishing firm, Grosset & Dunlap, editing reference books. She has short, straight dark hair, hazel eyes, a small nose with chiseled nostrils, a generous mouth, a rangy, well-hipped body and smallish breasts. In one corner of her large bedroom there is an exercise bike. She keeps a record of how many in-place miles she pedals every day. She is an erotic sophisticate, though not in any ways unknown to him: just terribly skilled. Sometimes she asks him for more, more, mewing the word. At such times, afterwards, she looks old (which she’s not; she’s only forty-one or -two) and turns her face away from him as if, in her spent state, he mustn’t see her. But she recovers quickly; all she needs i
s a moment. Always, always she tells him he is wonderful, that he is wonderfully good at it. He repeats what she has said, turning it on herself: she too is wonderfully good at it. From the beginning she let him know he is not her only resource; that there are two others. “Old friends,” she calls them. She is not curious about his past or present life. (By now, she knows his wife died more than a year ago; he has, though, never spoken Maud’s name to her.) About her own life, he mirrors her incuriosity. What they do tell each other is that they like each other, and that their affair (if that’s what it is), exactly as it is, is fine: that for both of them, just as it is, it couldn’t be better.
Almost immediately, the people closest to him in heart and mind saw the difference in him and in their individual ways, spoke of it.
His father used the word “potent”: “I’m pleased to see you looking your old potent self again,” he said. The broad, secular way he said it caused Morgan almost to shy: because of the flashed revelation about his father that after his wife’s death (Morgan’s mother’s death), in time and clandestinely, there had been someone with whom he too had formed a sexual liaison; someone who had made him, again, a “potent” man. Who? Who could it have been? he instantly wondered…. From the summer he turned thirteen (by which time his mother had been dead over a year), he retained a memory of standing at a window in his Aunt Letitia’s house, watching his father play a spirited game of croquet with a lady. Now he remembered his father’s laughter, how his father and the lady had laughed together—that his father was laughing at all!—that something the lady said, something she kept saying, kept making his father laugh. Other than the fact that she made his father laugh, he hadn’t a least memory of the distant lady. But now he wondered: had she been the one?…He would never know; could never ask, standing there now beside his father, adultly reassessing his remark.
Matters of Chance Page 37
