The House of the Prophet

by Louis Auchincloss

  I had hoped that our cruise would be the occasion of enlightening Felix’s wife, whom I knew to be a most intelligent woman, as to the essentially harmless nature of Matilda’s expectations. It was really so easy to make Matilda happy! But I was wrong. Frances Leitner, for all her quiet and inoffensive reserve, managed somehow to stick out noticeably as not belonging to Matilda’s domain. Perhaps it was not conceivable to Frances that anyone could see the world quite as Matilda saw it.

  For example, when Matilda, at one of our meals, was describing, in her high comic style of mock gravity, how a poor clerk at an office Christmas party had got drunk and accused Mr. Dinwiddie to his face of being the “apostle of greed and the prophet of grab,” Frances, not comprehending that such heresy was being treated lightly only because the audience was a “safe” one, laughed with an amusement obviously sympathetic to the culprit and offered this comment:

  “I wonder if the opportunity for that kind of catharsis shouldn’t be considered one of the advantages of an office party. Perhaps the invitations should read: ‘each guest shall have an “indulgence” to insult one partner. Senior associates may insult two.’”

  Matilda’s obvious dismay was made worse by George Dinwiddie’s merriment.

  “Would the indulgences be exchangeable?” he asked. “How many would a clerk have to collect before he could let fly at the managing partner? Eh, Grant?”

  I took this in good part, for I knew that my senior sometimes chafed at the tightness of my management. Matilda, however, was convinced that Frances was introducing a serious note of dissension into our legal family. Later that day, as she and I strolled on the towpath, she placed the matter squarely between me and the Gallic scenery.

  “I begin to wonder if Frances Leitner is ever going to be a true member of Dinwiddie, Stowe. I had my doubts about her last May when she failed to show up at my tea for the wives. When I suggested to her that she must have got her dates mixed, she said, no, she hadn’t forgotten at all; she simply couldn’t abide ‘hen parties.’ She said this as if it were something that I should naturally understand. As if I had been giving a garden party and she had hay fever!”

  “I suppose she’s never had to be on a team before.”

  “But she might at least have the imagination to know what it is. She’s supposed to be so brilliant. Well, in my opinion she’s either very stupid, or she’s playing some funny game.”

  I could not explain to Matilda that there were people—intelligent, rational people—who thought that the kind of organization that I had labored so long and so hard to build up was not only inhumane but actually antisocial. Matilda believed in absolutes, and she was much too useful to me to be allowed to be shaken in these beliefs. I decided to take the tack that Frances was a kind of harmless freak who had to be accepted and perhaps gently isolated.

  “If you let her be, you’ll find she’s little enough trouble,” I suggested. “She’s very quiet, after all. Rather a little mouse. Nobody’s going to notice her much.”

  “Don’t underestimate that woman, Grant!” my good spouse insisted hotly. “She may look like a mouse, but she has a pile of will power. Don’t forget she’s a lawyer and has acted for all kinds of desperate criminals in her legal aid work. And then, she’s a radical, too. Did you know that she believes in a hundred percent inheritance tax?”

  “Did she volunteer that or did you get it out of her?”

  Matilda paused to reflect. She was always a truthful woman. “I don’t recall. It came out in one of our talks. She thinks each generation should have to make its own way.”

  “I’ve heard you say something rather like that yourself. Anyway, Frances Leitner is not a congresswoman, so she can’t initiate money bills. We needn’t care what she thinks.”

  “That’s all very well, Grant, but consider where she’s getting it from. Do you know that your partner Felix is writing a book? About constitutional law? Hadn’t you better ask him about it?”

  “I suppose his book is his own business.”

  “Is it? I’m warning you, Grant. Don’t ever say I didn’t.”

  “Never fear, darling. I shan’t.”

  But the very next morning, pacing the walls of Carcassonne with George Dinwiddie and Felix, I was reminded of Matilda’s forebodings. George was enraptured by the vision of battlements and towers that stretched below us. He said that it reminded him of a castle in the background of a painting in a book of hours. It was not so much the Middle Ages as the legend of the Middle Ages, a faery keep, the palace of some mighty wizard or hideous giant in a tale of enchantment.

  “Legend, indeed!” Felix agreed with a chuckle. “But it’s the legend of Viollet-le-Duc. I confess I’m not partial to reconstructions. I prefer the grimmest, most shapeless pile of old stones to the fanciest restoration.”

  “Why, in God’s name?” George asked in astonishment.

  “Because it’s true!”

  “But even if it isn’t just like the old castle,” I protested, “isn’t it like a castle? I agree with George. To me Carcassonne is a kind of hymn to the Middle Ages.”

  “Well, it may be my loss that I don’t have that kind of imagination,” Felix said, with at least assumed humility. “I can never forgive Richelieu for destroying the great fortresses. What a sightseer’s paradise this country might have been!”

  “He had to do it,” George said, in his placid tone. “He had to break the power of the nobles. He had to forge France into a strong unit.”

  “Why, in God’s name?” Felix demanded, echoing George’s emphasis.

  “You know that as well as I do, Felix. Would you have preserved a few old castles at the price of general looting and bloodshed? Of course, you wouldn’t.”

  “I’m not at all sure. If beautiful things are to be preserved, maybe government shouldn’t be too strong. Isn’t that your thesis at home, Mr. D.? Aren’t you considered the archenemy of the welfare state?”

  “Of the welfare state, sir. Not of the strong state.”

  “Well, I guess I’m one of those anachronisms that still believe the best government is the least government.”

  “Does that make you what is now being called a ‘strict constructionist’?” Dinwiddie asked.

  “Of the Constitution? Perhaps not. I have more faith in legislation than I do in constitutions. More faith in legislation, to tell the truth, than I do in courts.”

  “You would not, I trust, challenge the power of the courts to declare an act of the legislature unconstitutional?”

  “Would I not, Mr. D?” But Felix, seeing that his interlocutor was more than half serious, smiled. “Not before you, anyway!”

  This conversation made me considerably more curious about the nature of Felix’s book. I mentioned it to Matilda before our lunch at the hotel in the castle that day, and she told me later that this was what caused her to send a cable to Jim Allerton, a junior partner in the firm who was my particular assistant in administration and who was Matilda’s favorite “young man.” But I suspect that what really caused her to take so drastic a step was the exasperation that Frances caused her at that very lunch.

  Matilda was telling one of her “grand client” stories. She loved, in “safe” company, to hold forth on the humorous aspects of the manners of such clients as Mrs. Jay Baldwin, an octogenarian millionairess, whose comic air of self-importance was a source of many legends in New York. I suspected that the reason Mrs. Baldwin saw so much of her lawyers and doctors and financial advisers was that only in the company of those whom she paid could she command the deference that her naive but essentially good-natured ego required. Matilda now related the story of our visit to Mrs. Baldwin over the previous Labor Day weekend. We had been surprised to find that we were expected to leave Sunday night and had reminded the butler of what the morrow was. “Mrs. Baldwin does not recognize Labor Day,” he gravely explained to us.

  Frances smiled with the perfunctoriness of one who has heard that story many times before.

  “I’
m not surprised that Cousin Daisy should hate Labor Day,” she observed. “After all, her father came close to being murdered in Pittsburgh in the nineties. But she’s still a perfect darling when it’s a question of an individual worker and not a union. I went to her once about an old valet of Cousin Jay’s, who I heard was in financial trouble, and she at once pensioned the poor fellow.”

  The effect of this on Matilda was nothing less than massive. I watched with restrained amusement as her round, pale, almost lineless face took on the faint pink of incipient battle. Matilda came from Omaha; she had never mastered the labyrinthine relationships of old New York. France’s background was a total enigma to her. By Matilda’s standards, Frances, being married to a Jew, should not be related to people like Mrs. Baldwin. Even though I had told her of Frances’s Knickerbocker genealogy, she could not really believe that any woman without looks, fortune or clothes, and destitute, more over, of the least air of distinction, could really have any social pretensions.

  “You call Mrs. Baldwin ‘Cousin Daisy’?” my wife was now startled enough to ask.

  “Does it sound absurdly old-fashioned? I always preferred ‘Mr.’ or ‘Mrs.’ to the eternal ‘Cousin This’ and ‘Cousin That.’ But I was brought up to it, and it’s a hard habit to break.”

  “Then she is your cousin?”

  “Oh, not her. Good Lord, no, not with that fortune. None of my poor branch of the Ward family ever had two nickels to rub together. But Cousin Jay, her husband, was a first cousin of both my parents. Does that sound incestuous? It isn’t really. You see his mother was a Ward and Daddy’s aunt, and his father was a nephew of my grandmother Livingston. It’s all ridiculously complicated, but I was made to learn these things as a child, and, for the life of me, I can’t forget them.”

  What I think was most galling to Matilda was the evident sincerity of Frances’s manner, which disclaimed any grandeur in such connections. She was like an archduchess who has shed her rank to join the commoners. She had her memories, and she would correct you on facts, if necessary. But only if necessary.

  “Then Harry and Arthur Baldwin are your... second cousins?”

  “Double second, to be exact. Which makes them the same blood kin as first. And I’ll tell you a funny story in that connection. We used to have to pass the hat at Christmas for a poor Irving cousin who lived up the Hudson in what was almost a shack. Mother had the bright idea of asking Cousin Daisy to help, hoping, of course, that she would take over the whole thing, but Father pointed out that this particular Irving was no relation of Cousin Jay’s. Well, we all pooh-poohed this and said it was impossible, and we got out the family tree to prove it, but, alas! Every branch we traced had either the poor Irving or Cousin Jay, but never both. Father was quite right. They were not related.”

  “Couldn’t you have asked the Baldwins, anyway?” George asked with a wink. “They’d never have known.”

  “Oh, of course, they wouldn’t have!” Frances agreed. “And Cousin Daisy, who used to refer to her iron ore millions as ‘the lovely fortune that enables me to help so many people,’ would have written any check we asked. But there were rules. Poor relatives had to be supported, but they had to be related. Oh, we were very strict indeed—about some things. Yes, New Yorkers of that ilk, for all their provincialism, had a few standards. More, anyway, than Cousin Daisy’s robber baron progenitors. If that’s saying anything!’

  George and Felix chuckled. I smiled, but Matilda did not. I knew that she was inwardly seething. That so dim a little creature as Frances Leitner should pre-empt the great Mrs. Baldwin was bad enough. That she should toss her away was far worse. My wife now changed the subject firmly, but I knew that I had not heard the end of it.

  Matilda left the barge in Beziers for “a morning’s shopping,” during which she actually telephoned Jim Allerton in New York. When she returned she led me to our little stateroom and closed the door.

  “It may interest you to know that your loyal partner, Mr. Leitner, is entitling his forthcoming book The Great American Myth. And do you know what the great American myth is? The Constitution! Leitner maintains... now let me get this straight.” Here Matilda busily consulted the notes of her telephone parley. “Leitner maintains that except for the Bill of Rights, the Constitution was designed simply to set up the machinery of government. And that even the Bill of Rights applies only to people... am I correct? Yes, to people, that is, to human beings. Not to businesses and corporations. Jim said you’d be interested in that!”

  I was. I listened grimly now until she had finished and then went up to the foyer. I found Felix reading galleys and remembered that he had received a large package in our Beziers mail delivery.

  “Is that by any chance The Great American Myth?”

  He looked up, surprised, but by no means perturbed. “How did you know? Would you care to look at it? I have two sets.”

  “Very much.”

  That afternoon I remained on board while the others visited a medieval abbey, and read Felix’s little book from start to finish. Of course, it was brilliant. In half a dozen essays he traced, with devastating wit and accuracy, the tortured word games that our judiciary has had to play—ever since John Marshall’s assumption of the power to outlaw unconstitutional laws—in order to prove to the world that we always had and always should obey the sacred document of 1787. It was a beautiful book. It was perhaps a work of art. But what had I to do with beautiful books and works of art?

  That evening I took Felix for a stroll on the towpath and asked him if he had ever thought of using a pen name.

  “I could, of course,” he replied. “But I wouldn’t. Why should I?”

  “Does it not occur to you, my friend, that your thesis might embarrass the firm? To say nothing of embarrassing George Dinwiddie?”

  “You astound me, Grant. Why should anyone be embarrassed? Except possibly myself, when the law school professors start to pull me apart.”

  “Because we are representing clients whose very existence may depend upon the present interpretation of the commerce and due process clauses. How do we look, arguing the sanctity of those clauses in the highest court of the land, when one of our partners—indeed the one who may have written the very brief before the bench—advertises to the world that he regards the Constitution as a rag?”

  “Surely there is a difference between an attorney’s arguments and his private convictions?”

  “You sound like a raw law student! Do you think that when corporations as vast as Magnum Steel and the Bank of Commerce retain general counsel, they don’t expect them to be generally consistent in all their public utterances?”

  “I don’t think I care what they think. So long as I write the best briefs that can be written for them, that’s all they’re entitled to expect. Surely I have a right to my own opinions.”

  “A right? Who’s talking about rights? When you’re in the business of representing a company like Magnum, you do it twenty-four hours a day—or decline the retainer. That’s what being a corporation lawyer is all about. If you want to be a criminal attorney and represent a murderer one day and his victim the next, like the old-time repertory ham who played Hamlet one night and Figaro another, that’s your affair. We have a different philosophy at 65 Wall.”

  “So I see.” When I knew Felix better, I learned to recognize the opaque look that I now saw in his eyes. It was the mark of his limit. He could be charming, persuasive, wonderfully amiable, up to a certain point. And then, suddenly, he would stop. And when he stopped, nothing—bribes, arguments, love, sentiment, torture, death—would move him. The ego was solid, closed, complete. “I guess I’m an old repertory ham.”

  “I don’t suppose one philosophy is necessarily better than the other,” I decided to concede. “A lawyer who changes his opinion with each client is called a mouthpiece. And one, like myself, who adheres to a few corporations, is said to be ‘kept.’ But the choice must still be made.”

  “And I’ve made it. The book will be publis
hed as planned, under my own name. Do you want me to resign from the firm?”

  We faced each other, quite without anger. I was not angry because I had trained myself never to be angry in crises. Felix was not angry because he was above it all. He actually smiled.

  “I’ll speak to George,” I said. And then I returned to the barge.

  Felix tactfully took Frances out to dinner in Beziers, and George and I and Matilda dined on the barge. But the conversation did not go at all as I had expected. George was not like his usual serene self. He drank more wine than was his wont and became very grumpy.

  “I can see where you’re leading, Grant, and I tell you right now, I won’t have it! I don’t mind saying I’ve grown quite dependent on Felix in the last six months. I like the way his mind works. I like his arguments. We’ve become a team. I’m not prepared to lose Felix Leitner because of your exaggerated theeories of what we owe our clients.”

  “It seems to me, George, that a company that employs twenty thousand men and supplies the nation with a commodity essential to its business and necessary to its defense may feel entitled to counsel who at least profess lip service to the legal and economic theories that support its continuance.”

  “I know, I know. It’s a question of how far you carry it. You forget, Grant, that I started life as a small-town practitioner in Wythe County where I was happy to take any brief that came my way. I remember defending a man who was charged with robbing a bank of which my uncle was a director.”

  “I’m very well aware of your early days, George. I hope one day to write a chapter about them for our firm history. But what was right in Wythe County may not be right in Wall Street.”

  “Felix may cost you some of your clients, George!” Matilda warned him.

  “My dear Matilda, I must ask you to leave this matter to the professionals, where it unhappily belongs.” George here made my wife a stiff little bow and gave her a severe little smile, and I knew that even Matilda would not open her mouth on the subject again. “I think that even if what you say is generally true, Grant, a firm the size of ours can afford an exception, and I should be pleased if you would make one of Felix.”