East Side Story
Page 13
Of course, he was fair enough to recognize that, insofar as federal advancement was concerned, the recent years had been against both of them. Carter’s federal glories had been under past Republican regimes—Coolidge and Hoover—while his son-in-law was still too young to do anything but plod away to establish his basis on Wall Street. And in the years of the Great Depression and the New Deal, Carter’s famed appearances before the United States Supreme Court to attack savagely and often successfully the constitutionality of F.D.R.‘s social legislation had created a breach between Washington and Wall Street that rendered out of the question any political bid to a partner of the thundering attorney who had made himself the symbol of what was reactionary in America.
Indeed, David had come to question, entirely aside from his own future, whether Carter’s reputation was altogether a good thing for the firm. Granted that it had brought in plenty of rich clients, would it, looking ahead, as the clear-minded David always did, be ultimately attractive to the brightest law students, whom the firm always hoped to attract? For David, who took sides in his own actions but rarely in his own mind, and who never honored his prejudices with any unnecessary loyalty, saw that the New Deal was more the wave of the future than the laissez-faire of its opponents, and bent his mind to ways of making his father-in-law a continuing asset rather than a liability to the firm.
It was thus that he concocted the plan of making use of the government’s arbitrary imprisonment of Japanese immigrants in the beginning of the war. Although he was not personally much concerned with what was done to the poor souls who were thus roughly rounded up and incarcerated, despite their American citizenship and utter blamelessness, and although he quite took in the hopelessness of defending them against the war fever that swept the nation, the government, and even the courts, he had the wit to see that when times changed, as they inevitably would, this blatant disregard of the most fundamental rights would be seen as a scandal and that those who had opposed it would be deemed heroic.
It was with this in mind that he approached Carter with the proposal that he take a brief in the defense of the incarcerated. The senior partner, as always, honored him with his full attention. Carter was a small man, wiry and tense, whose slightly ominous stare was hard to interpret. His heavy concentration as he listened seemed to promise a heavy response, but David was only too aware of the older man’s unpredictability and knew that he might answer with either a hearty guffaw or even an off-color joke. Carter was equally aware of his reputation for the unexpected and reveled in it. As a young man he had been known to make fun of T.R. to his face and get away with it!
This time, however, he neither smiled nor joked.
“Surely, David, the war powers of a President suffice to justify the measures that the Squire of the Hudson (you needn’t rise) has taken to safeguard our Western coast from the dangers of invasion?”
“Even if those dangers are remote? Even if they may not exist? If we should ever find ourselves at war with Great Britain, and an arbitrary chief of state should decide to lock up all citizens of Anglo-Saxon heritage, where would you and I find ourselves, sir?”
“In the majority, my friend. And we wouldn’t put up with it!”
“But how long will that majority last, sir? You know how the demographic charts predict that—”
“Yes, yes, yes,” Carter interrupted impatiently. This was not something he cared to think about. “Get to the point, David. What do you want me to do?”
David knew his man. He knew that Carter’s somewhat eighteenth-century conception of the Constitution was balanced with deep humanitarian convictions. If Carter believed in an almost total freedom of action for the great corporation leaders in whose capable hands, as he saw it, the economic destiny of our nation had been fortunately placed, he was also seized with a Jeffersonian passion for the dignity and freedom of the individual man. Carter had no use for kings or despots, and in religion he was at least a deist. His vision of the ideal republic was one where no man need fear repression of his body or his tongue, and where any man of brains and ability and determination, no matter how humbly born, might rise to take hold of any business that would cover the land with rails, pump oil from the bowels of the earth, and smelt ore into steel.
With this kind of libertarian argument David had been able to induce Carter to argue case after case on behalf of the unfortunate Japanese, and as he had foreseen, when the war was over, his father-in-law was hailed by law reviews, honored at testimonial dinners, and his name enshrined among the great defenders of civil rights. Fortunately, it did not come to the attention of the liberal circles of the bar that David had a good deal of trouble keeping his senior from taking a brief defending the continued segregation of public schools in the South. Some of the old man’s ideas of liberty did not jibe with the times, and nothing could persuade him that “separate but equal” was not the same as equal.
But that was just David’s gripe: that everything he, David, did redounded to the credit of his father-in-law, never to himself. The world seemed to smell out any lack of burning conviction and to honor only those who felt such. How was it possible that people somehow suspected that he, David, did not give much of a hoot about Japanese internment and that Carter did? Yet it was he, David, who brought about the briefs in their favor! Carter on his own would never have done a thing for them. It was the same way with the firm’s German clients before the war. David had come to the reluctant conclusion, persuaded by his son, that the Nazi taint and the firm’s public relations required that the firm cease its representation of Hider-dominated businesses, and when he finally convinced Carter of this, and the old man took fire and enthusiastically shed them, Carter got all the credit. Because he cared, although it took David to get him to care! And David, who had acted purely out of policy, was sneered at. How did people know what he was thinking? And why did they care? Wasn’t it the action and not the inner motivation—or inner fantasy (for that was what it often was)—that mattered? Evidently not.
It was not thus that he had visualized what his relationship with the great man would ultimately become when he had courted Carter’s daughter Janetta in the winter of 1917. He had dared to predict it as an evolving partnership in which, with the march of ineluctable time, senior and junior would gradually and painlessly change places, all in the natural order of things. He now saw that he should have foreseen that his spouse’s parent would be as solid and enduring an urban fixture as Grant’s tomb.
In that early winter that saw our entry into the First World War, Adam Carter had been free of federal duties and was repairing a fortune depleted by the lesser pay of government service, as the all-powerful head of a small but brilliantly successful litigating firm. True to his never-failing confidence in his own future, no matter what years flew by, Carter had used a large percentage of his remaining capital to erect a freestanding Georgian town house, the long side of whose oblong shape faced not on a less tax-expensive side street but boldly on Park Avenue. There at night he worked with foreign experts on a secret bipartisan committee designated by President Wilson to work out a peace plan to be presented to the victors when an armistice should come. David, who had once impressed Carter when he had argued a brief against him—the attorney-statesman had always an eye out for young forensic talent—and who, though already commissioned, could be exempted from army service at Carter’s wish, had been requested by the latter for his peace-plan staff, and had actually been asked to move into Carter’s great house to be available for work at all times.
Of course the appointment had not come without maneuvering on David’s part. He had carefully cultivated the first good impression he had made on Carter in court, following it up with respectful calls at the latter’s home and letters with bright comments on many of the older man’s law review articles or public addresses. The reward of his appointment had been beyond his wildest dreams, and he was intent on taking full advantage of it, including the courtship of Carter’s big, blond, self-assured elder daughter.
Janetta, large and fair and strong, had played a kind of dumb Brunhilde to her father’s wily Wotan. Papa always came first, particularly as she had lost her mother early and, as the elder daughter, had sought to take her place with a widower who had chosen to remain that, but she saw no difficulty or conflict in her attitude even should she marry, for she took it blithely for granted that everyone else, including any husband-to-be, would feel the same way. Marriage was an expected rite, even for a Valkyrie; David was pleasant, attentive, clever, and approved by Papa—what else could a daughter want? And when David, duly wed, after the war had prevailed upon her father to assume the leadership of the larger firm of which he was a junior partner and which had been temporarily crippled by a pair of senior demises, Janetta had felt that it was only fitting that her father should rule in the office as he had always ruled in the home.
Their marriage, which some observers called tepid, though both got out of it pretty much what they had sought and expected, was mightily assisted by the distraction of hard work. David’s labors at the law accounted for the bulk of his time and partially satisfied both his ambition and his imagination, while Janetta’s indefatigable energy in fund-raising for charitable causes went far beyond the usual fashionable requirements: she enjoyed every minute of her highly successful drives. But the precariousness of the marriage’s basis was ultimately made sadly clear by the wife’s catastrophic menopause, followed by a near-fatal hysterectomy. Janetta, who had never been seriously ill in her life, suffered a nervous breakdown, and emerged from it only with the aid of a High Church Episcopal priest who transformed her formerly conventional religious observances into something much more fervid. This might have been an adequate salve to her apprehensive disposition had she not, for the first time in their union, turned the full lights of her attention on her husband in what began as a pleading and ended as an angry resolution to make him share her new faith.
David had always before been quite willing to give lip service, which cost him nothing, to all her expressed enthusiasms. After all, little more than a smirk or a nod had been needed to satisfy a woman who assumed that the world around her held all her little values. But now that she wanted him to say prayers with her and go to church with her, he waxed at first restless, then impatient, then irritated, and at last explosive. “I’m goddamned if I’ll let you turn me into a Tartuffe!” he finally shouted at her, and the shocked silence that followed this outburst marked a profound change in their relationship. It was the reverse of what had earlier happened to his brother Sam and Alida.
Janetta was now forced to face the fact that David had sides to his nature that had not been revealed to her in the twenty years of their marriage. She was at a loss as to how to handle it, and when she went to her father (who else was there for her to go to?), it was only to be cruelly rebuffed.
“Hasn’t David seen things your way for three decades?” he cried with a high cackle of laughter. “Can you expect more of a man? Good God, you women are insatiable!”
The souring of his dealings with his wife brought an odd but significant alteration to David’s emotional needs. In all his life thus far he had been stalwartly independent of the usual human craving for love, both given and received. So long as his relationships with family, friends, and associates had been formally correct and outwardly cordial, he had not minded if they were tepid. His best friend, his most congenial companion, had been himself. Life was the clay, he the potter. His younger sister Estelle, whom he had lost while he was just starting out as a lawyer, had been a rare exception. Her intelligence had penetrated to the depths of his egotism, and her understanding had taught her that this quality in her brother might be used as well for good as for bad. In short, she had both seen him and loved him, the only combination that could undermine the walls he had built around his prickly personality. He might have been a different person had she lived.
What he found difficult now to face was hostility in the home. It was, of course, what he expected in the marketplace; indeed, that was what the struggle of life was all about. But the presence of domestic opposition bred in him the need for something else, something warmer and more gladdening when he opened his front door back from work, some gentle massage for a weary brow. And David began to be aware that if this was ever going to be offered him, it would only be by his son, Ronald, the sole issue of his marriage, an awareness that soon blossomed into a conviction.
The boy even looked like Estelle. He had her soft brown eyes, her delicately sculpted features, her pallor. He had been a beautiful child, and he was turning into a beautiful man. Slight of build but seamlessly put together, suggesting a poet, he was nonetheless sturdy and had a loud laugh of almost vulgar enthusiasm. His goodwill and good humor were infectious, and he had the gift of immediately reconciling his parents if a quarrel was threatened in his presence. People found it hard to be disagreeable when Ronny was around. Nor was it because he was naïve or innocent. In fact, he was very shrewd, though, like his late aunt, he made every kind of charitable allowance for those he loved. And wonderfully, indisputably, he loved his father. He even seemed to want to protect David from David, as if he had some mysterious mission to guide his father through the sloughs of despond. To his mother he was blandly affectionate, charmingly considerate, but it was as if he sensed that there was not much he could do about her. She was what she was.
His life was a succession of successes. He was a popular student at Chelton, Yale, and Yale Law School, a gallant naval officer in World War II, and a brilliant and industrious associate in his father’s law firm. He had wanted to go into politics, but David had persuaded him to follow the example of such great leaders of the New York bar as Elihu Root, Henry L. Stimson, and Adam Carter, and first establish the firm and profitable base of a law partnership from which he could take a leave of absence if called by a President to fulfill some cabinet or ambassadorial position. At the time of what David came to think of as the “Krantz crisis,” Ronny had been an associate for two years and was doing very well.
There was only one aspect of his son’s personality to which David took private exception—private because there was certainly nothing that he could reasonably complain about and even less that he could do about it. It was the young man’s unqualified worship of his maternal grandfather. To him Adam Carter was the symbol of the great American lawyer-statesman at his finest and best, whose genius oiled the wheels of the nation’s business and whose wisdom guided Presidents in times of war and world crises. And how could David, himself one of the embellishers of the legend, even hint that there might be another side to his sainted father-in-law? Still, there were times when it was bitter tea to swallow.
The worst of these sprang from the issue with Joel Krantz over the firm name. Krantz had long been the thorn in David’s side that made his troubles with his wife seem a harmless itch. Krantz headed the important litigation department of the firm. He was a big bulldog of a man, handsome enough in his own rough way, with high-rising gray-brown hair parted in the middle, a broad brow, massive chin, and steely eyes, usually garbed in well-pressed black with a scarlet necktie, who made no pretense of hiding his humble Brooklyn background and sneered op
enly at the amenities of social life, which he lumped under the term “fancy pants.” But he was no bull in a china shop; nothing crumbled before his stealthy but steady advance except his adversaries in the courtroom. A great trial lawyer, he could thunder or purr as the occasion demanded, and he instilled in his clients the pleasing conviction that God was on their side. Adam Carter had spotted him years before as a coming force in the courts and had lured him away from a rival firm with an offer that had then seemed to David extravagant. But it had worked, as even David had to concede.
So long as Carter’s grip was firmly on the firm’s tiller, a comparative peace reigned over the partnership. But when age began to relax the old man’s hold—at least to the eyes of his intimates, if not to those of the public—and he seemed to be retaining, like Lear, “only … the name and all the additions to a king,” Krantz began suggesting to any partner with whom he happened to be lunching the possible desirability of raising himself to equality with David in the number two spot of the firm and even changing its letterhead from Carter & Carnochan to Carter, Carnochan & Krantz. When he had enlisted what he considered an adequate number in his favor, he approached David directly in the latter’s office.
“We’re living in a new world, Carnochan,” he began, in a near-hectoring tone. It was his habit to call his partners, with a few chosen exceptions, by their last name, a ploy that seemed designed to keep them at a discreet distance, or at least to warn them to look out for themselves. “These young fellas of ours returning from war service have had a rougher time than they ever anticipated. If a man’s been through the hell of the Normandy beaches or Iwo Jima, he’s not ready to sit quietly by while some old geezer who never saw a shot fired in anger gobbles the firm profits that younger guys have earned. He’s lost four years in uniform, and he wants a slice of the here and now.”
“Are you and I, Joel, among these old geezers?” David asked acidly. “Are you suggesting that we surrender our undeserved share of the take to these young Turks?”