My mother had gone to visit one of my sisters. I had no one to consult but Felix’s mother, who had just arrived for the weekend.
***
When Felix and I were first married, I had tended to dread his mother’s visits. It had seemed to me that I could never provide the proper elegance for her. But I soon learned that all her little rules and habits in clothes and household arrangements were designed solely for herself. She expected nothing at all of others. So long as her hair was properly set and dyed, so long as her satins were smoothly pressed and her facial make-up just right, she did not care if the rest of the world was arrayed in potato sacks. Consequently she was the easiest visitor in the world, even the easiest house guest. She would busily convert her bedroom into her own little fragrant bower and then emerge to be serenely at home in the rest of the house.
At Seal Cove she would sit contentedly, if rather regally, on the porch in an old wicker armchair with a peacock-tail back and gaze placidly over the water. She always declined to go out to parties with us but was perfectly content to have her meals alone on these occasions. When, on the second afternoon of her present visit, I at last told her of Felix’s letter and my sense of outrage, she remained absolutely motionless for several moments. Then, like a stork, she turned the small, pretty head on the long, pale neck to face me with a cool glare of what I would have thought was hostility had I not known her better. I knew now that it was the defensive posture behind which she hid her bewilderment at the strangeness of others.
“You ask what you should do, my child? Why, in heaven’s name, should you do anything? I always know that people are going to get into worse trouble when they talk of having to do things.”
“How can I go on living with a man whose political views I abominate!”
“But you say he’s changed them. Why not wait and see if he won’t change them back? Felix has always been mercurial.”
“You mean he has no principles?”
“I rather think he may have too many.”
“Isn’t that the same thing?”
“Not at all. Listen to me, my dear. Felix is a very good husband. You’re not going to get a better one.”
“But I don’t want another husband! That’s not the point at all. I love Felix. You know that, Mrs. Leitner. I simply wonder what further use I can be to him, if he rejects my advice and makes his major commitments without consulting me.”
“That was the way it was with his uncle Isidore and aunt Renata,” Mrs. Leitner pointed out with sudden eagerness, as if she had just discovered an analogy that would solve all my problems. “Isidore really never cared much for paintings, except academic things where naked slave girls were being sold at Arab auctions. He liked bronzes and golden bowls and porcelains—things he could touch. But Renata went right ahead and bought what she wanted. Isidore took it very well; he always paid up. So things worked out. Between them they put together a most distinguished collection.”
“Except for the slave girls.”
“Well, I think even they went to the Metropolitan. They’re probably in the cellar now.”
“Where I suppose I should be,” I said gloomily. But I felt already that there might be a funny kind of therapy in my mother-in-law’s attitude. That she should equate my concern for my fellow man with Uncle Isidore’s prurient canvases was a sobering thought. Was it possible that I was taking the whole thing in general, and myself in particular, too seriously?
“The one thing I will say about myself as a mother,” Mrs. Leitner continued, “is that I recognized early that I was never going to have the slightest effect on Felix’s decisions. It has made our relationship much pleasanter that I haven’t tried. Let me suggest that you borrow a leaf, my dear, from your old mother-in-law’s notebook.”
“Oh, Mrs. Leitner, I don’t know what to do!”
“Then don’t do anything.” Now she gazed at me silently until my eyes met hers. It seemed to me that I could make out something like feeling in them. Certainly I found it in her words. “We are not demonstrative folk, Felix and I. I cannot ever be sure what he feels or does not feel. But I can say this. I love you, my child. And I should be very sad indeed if anything were to happen between you and Felix. I simply cannot believe that a national election or a job in Wall Street can be as important as your joint happiness.”
Well, there we were. She was a wonderful woman, my mother-in-law. I had never until that moment properly appreciated her. Arguments about my duty as a wife or in defense of Felix’s political acrobatics would have merely aroused my ire. She had the wisdom to rest her case on a simple plea for our joint happiness. I had been in the habit of assuming that there did not exist two women more different than myself and Florine Leitner. Now, suddenly, we were united in love. For I found that I did love that straight, powdered figure with the dyed hair and the bright clear smile.
I threw my arms around her and wept. Could I make up to her for my long undervaluation? No. I saw at once in her gentle embarrassment that I had gone as far toward intimacy as I ever should go. So I dried my eyes. When Mrs. Leitner had said that she was not demonstrative, she meant it. I comprehended at last why she had been so slight a loss to the stage.
And so it was that I tried to accept her—and to accept her son—for what they were, or at least for what they appeared to be. I resolved to say no more about the national election, and I was good to my resolution. I did not even indulge in crowing when Felix’s candidate carried only two states in November. And I learned to behave myself as the wife of a partner of Dinwiddie, Stowe & Whelan.
Nobody, least of all Felix, ever gave me proper credit for my change. Of course, it is almost impossible for families to recognize any fundamental change in a member, though they are quick to spot a superficial one. I had established a reputation for constantly proselytizing for my political views, and I suppose I shall die with it. As my friends and relatives can easily figure out what side I am on in any major public issue, they are quick to assume that I am canvassing for it. Perhaps in a way they are right. The unspoken word can be thunderous.
Memorandum of Grant Stowe Concerning the Partnership of Felix Leitner, Prepared in 1959 in Connection with His History of Dinwiddie, Stowe & Whelan
AT THE TIME of this writing the big downtown law firms of Manhattan have reached so great a size that most of them have senior partners, or committees of senior partners, who devote at least as much of their time to office administration as to the practice of law. They have learned that if overhead is not constantly watched, it will eat up the very fattest profits, and that if they fail to keep abreast of the latest business machines, they will soon find their competitive position impaired. And what they all now recognize must receive their first attention is the esprit de corps of the associate lawyers. If these are not made to feel that they have a future in the firm, if, on the contrary, they come to see themselves as mere hacks to be driven as hard as possible and rewarded only when they have jacked themselves into a position to run off with an important client, then the firm will become a joyless factory whose vital professional spirit will soon sputter out.
I pride myself that I was a pioneer in these matters. I saw as early as 1923, when I became a member of the venerable Wall Street firm of Walker & Whelan, that the essential problem was somehow not to lose the old-fashioned individualistic practitioner in the disciplined corps of highly specialized attorneys needed to service the great corporations. The key to the happy partner would be the happy clerk. I made it a rule of our firm to choose partners only from the body of our associates and to obtain good jobs for those who were “passed over.” As we took only law review men from the best law schools, a Walker & Whelan “graduate” was assured a high resale value. After only a few years of implementing this policy we had the most dedicated and hard-working clerks in Manhattan. Of course, I was called a “slave driver” and a “little Napoleon” by my rivals, but they all copied me.
I have never pretended to be wholly consistent. I knew that e
xceptions had to be made, and I did not hesitate to make them. The most important deviation occurred when I persuaded the membership to invite George Dinwiddie to come in as senior partner and to change our firm name to Dinwiddie, Stowe & Whelan. I intended this to reflect our final emergence from the nineteenth century and our resolution to be the first corporation law firm of the nation.
George Dinwiddie in 1925 was sixty years old and the most renowned appellant pleader of the federal courts. He had been governor of his native state, Virginia, a United States senator, and, briefly, Secretary of State. Tall, silver-haired, with a strong, resonant voice and an inimitable charm of manner, he seemed the essence of all that was finest in the Southern tradition. He was a Democrat, but a Jeffersonian one, quite acceptable to even our darkest Republican clients. During the depression, disgusted with the New Deal, he ceased even to vote for his party. As senior partner he devoted himself to his own great cases and left the management of the firm to me. It was an excellent arrangement. He was admired by the junior partners and clerks, and his benign disposition cast a glowing curtain over some of the inevitable rough spots of my just but realistic administration.
Dinwiddie gave the firm immense prestige. Perhaps I should have been content with his contribution and made no further exceptions to my rule of choosing partners from within. But I was greedy. I wanted the moon. I wanted the firm to be attractive not only to the business world but to the intellectuals. I wanted to appeal to the young people, and it occurred to me that we might attract the brightest third-year law students away from rival employers if we could somehow appear less stuffy than they. Suppose we had as a leading partner a man with a reputation as a writer, a teacher, a social philosopher? Suppose we had such a star as Felix Leitner?
There was method in my madness. His notoriety as a New Dealer had been canceled by his much excoriated (by the left) vote for Alfred Landon. I figured that some of our corporate clients might regard him as a brand plucked from the burning—or perhaps as a redeemed prodigal to be feasted. They might even come to see him as a kind of Trojan horse in which they could invade the capítol. I estimated—correctly, as it turned out—that his advice would be extremely valuable in dealing with the administrative agencies that were springing up everywhere. But what was there in it for Leitner? A large income, of course. I had reason to believe that the heavy psychiatric expenses of his son would make this attractive. Felix, indeed, accepted my offer with alacrity. He became a member of the firm on January 1, 1937.
What I did not anticipate was that he should become, in the first six months of his partnership, the right hand man of George Dinwiddie. Our leader was engaged in a series of great constitutional cases challenging the legislation of Franklin Roosevelt’s first term, and he proceeded quietly, but with his usual firmness, to preempt all of Felix’s time as a brief-writer. This was not precisely the function that I had visualized for our new recruit, but it was certainly a part of it, and I decided to make no comment but to watch the situation and read all drafts of the Dinwiddie briefs.
One of these was a succession of short, connected arguments, each following the other with a formidable logic and moving to a seemingly inevitable conclusion. The concise, crushing paragraphs were arranged like stanzas on the pages, separated by large blank spaces. I called in one of Dinwiddie’s litigation assistants and asked him why they were so printed.
“Oh, that’s Mr. Leitner’s method,” he explained. “He writes the argument and then gives it to us to fill in the cases.”
“You mean he writes the brief before reading the law?”
“Oh, yes, sir, quite on purpose. He says a good lawyer should be able to find a precedent for anything.”
At a partners’ lunch later that day I sat by Felix and quizzed him about his method. He was perfectly frank about it.
“But doesn’t that imply a certain contempt for precedent?” I asked.
“It implies a total contempt for precedent.”
“Is that an example of ‘advanced thinking’?”
“It’s an example of everybody’s thinking. Few, perhaps, acknowledge it quite so frankly as I. But the true basis of most judges’ thinking on any constitutional point is, Where do I want to come out? Once he’s decided that, he arranges the precedents and his interpretation of them accordingly.”
“I did not realize you were such a cynic.”
“My dear Grant, it’s not a question of cynicism. It’s a question of fact. The Constitution can be made to yield to any interpretation. It has in the past, and it will in the future. As one British friend of mine put it, What is the point of a document that requires your bar to play word games every time an important change in national policy is required?”
“I trust you don’t air these views outside the firm.”
I put this a bit in my managing partner’s tone, with a toothy smile and a hint of gruffness, but it struck me there and then that this was not going to work with Felix. After all, I had not had the indoctrinating of him. He gave me a rather odd stare as I turned from him to address the table on a matter of firm business, and I made a mental note to postpone the matter of his constitutional views for a later day.
We did not discuss them again until June, on a barge trip down the Canal du Midi in France. Since the death of Mrs. Dinwiddie three years before, Matilda and I had accompanied the old man on his annual summer trip to Europe. It had been Matilda’s idea to charter this luxurious passenger barge, with a crew of five, at Toulouse, and she had not been much pleased when Dinwiddie had suggested that the Leitners be included in our little party. However, we could hardly refuse, and I was secretly pleased at the opportunity of a more intimate acquaintance, not only with Felix but with his interesting wife. I hoped it might be my chance to weave them both more intimately into the firm family.
The trip itself was a delight. We reclined in deck chairs as the big, slow craft nosed its way down the placid narrow waterway, past hot, still fields and misty hills, which succeeded each other like Cézanne landscapes in an exhibition, and through small, sleepy, whitewashed villages. A motor car followed and met us at the docks to take us on excursions to castles and churches, to Roman ruins and caverns. I enjoyed strolling ahead on the old towpath while our barge waited its turn in the little locks; sometimes I would lend a hand at the crank or with the lines. It was a life of indolence against a background of seeming indolence, the perfect relief from our Wall Street frenzy.
We three men got on very well. By tacit agreement we left the law behind and immersed ourselves in the history and culture of southern France. Felix, who seemed to know everything, was casually instructive, charmingly so. Dinwiddie listened to him with the graceful deference that truly great men are apt to manifest in fields not their own, and immersed himself in the evenings in the books that Felix had brought for the trip. One would have thought, to talk to Dinwiddie, that he had no interest in the world but the early crusades and the persecution of the Albigensians. Frances Leitner, small and quiet, with her wise little smile, seemed not to miss a trick, historical, geographical or contemporary. She was curious but hard to impress, tolerant but hard to persuade. Like me, like Felix, even like old Dinwiddie, she seemed always on an even keel. We were a good traveling group.
It will be noted that I have defined the group as good travelers before coming to the fifth member. I yield to nobody in admiration of my late wife, Matilda, whom I loved and largely obeyed throughout the forty years of our very happy marriage. She was at all times a devoted and exemplary wife and mother, but I trust that I do not denigrate her memory in admitting that she had a temper. Few who felt it have forgotten it. When it was over, it was over—Matilda was not a grudge bearer—but while it lasted, well... enough said.
Matilda had one great virtue: she was always expansively benign and agreeable when she had her own way. Now this may sound sarcastic, but it is not intended to be. Many American women of her class and generation were perennial malcontents; they grumbled as much on their good day
s as on their bad. But Matilda was usually beaming, for the simple reason that people, starting with myself, usually gave in to her. I set the example, not, I insist, because I was weak, but because from the beginning I perceived that what Matilda desired above all things was my own good. There was no selfishness in her, unless one accepts the theory that a wife who identifies herself with her husband is disguising her own egotism under his. That is not a theory to which I have ever subscribed.
Matilda made almost a fetish of Dinwiddie, Stowe. She always referred to the firm in this abbreviated fashion, but our children used to say that, had my name occupied the first position, she would have abbreviated it still further. Children today have little reverence. Matilda believed that in a divinely ordained system of free enterprise, the corporation lawyers were the high priests of the Deity. It was to the great downtown firms such as mine that He had entrusted the moral rules of competition for the business community. If Matilda envisioned tycoons such as Harrison Williams or Thomas J. Watson as playing the roles of Henry II or Louis XIII, she saw George Dinwiddie and myself in the nobler ones of Thomas a Becket or Richelieu. However much she respected birth and wealth—and she did so, freely and frankly, without being in the least a toady—she reserved her highest esteem for those whose function it was to interpret laws that were to her as holy and as absolute as any that Moses received on the mountain top.
It followed, of course, that Matilda took with the utmost seriousness her duties as wife of the managing partner. She was constantly arranging social events for the partners, for the clients, for the associates, sometimes with their wives, sometimes without, either in our big, white, constantly redecorated house in Bronxville or in clubs or restaurants in the city. No problem was too small for her, no younger clerk’s newly wedded wife too humble. She was always kind and helpful, and always free with advice as to doctors, merchants, real estate brokers and summer rentals. She was even ready, if necessary, to advance funds. But there was undeniably a note of imperium in her assistance. She was perfectly democratic—so long as her rank was perfectly understood.
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