Table of Contents
Title Page
Table of Contents
Copyright
Dedication
Power in Trust
Power of Suggestion
Power of Bequest
The Single Reader
The Revenges of Mrs. Abercrombie
The Mavericks
The Power of Appointment
From Bed and Board
The Deductible Yacht
The “True Story” of Lavinia Todd
The Ambassador From Wall Street
The Crowning Offer
First printing
Copyright © 1955, 1962, 1963 by Louis Auchincloss
All rights reserved including the right to reproduce this book or parts thereof in any form
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 63-9077
Some of the stories in this volume appeared originally in various magazines, as follows:
Cosmopolitan: “From Bed and Board,” “The ‘True Story’ of Lavinia Todd,” “The Ambassador from Wall Street” (under the title “A Lady for All That”)
Good Housekeeping: “The Revenges of Mrs. Abercrombie” (under the title “Office Party”)
Harper’s Magazine: “The Deductible Yacht”
The New Yorker: “Power of Bequest” (under the title “The Colonel’s Foundation”)
The Saturday Evening Post: “Power in Trust,” “The Power of Appointment”
Printed in the U.S.A.
FOR LAWRENCE MORRIS
MY FRIEND AND PARTNER
Power in Trust
WHEN Clitus Tilney heard Tower, Tilney & Webb criticized as a “law factory” and its opinions described as “assembly line products,” it did not bother him in the least. He knew the fashion among lawyers to affect an aversion to administrative detail, to boast that their own firms were totally disorganized, that they practiced law in a bookish, informal atmosphere, suggestive of Victorian lithographs of county solicitors seated at rolltop desks and listening with wise smiles to the problems of youth and beauty. But he also knew, from his own early days, the price paid for that kind of atmosphere: clerks unpromoted and underpaid, or kept dangling in the hope of partnership until they were too old to get other jobs, aged partners grabbing too much of the profits, an office staff bullied by those spoiled old tartars whom the hoodwinked regarded sentimentally as “treasures.” And he knew what disorganization did to overhead. It might be feasible in a firm of twenty lawyers, but when Tilney had joined Tower & Strong it already numbered thirty-four, and now, under his leadership, it had risen to seventy. These, with a staff of a hundred, occupied two great gleaming floors in a new glass cube at 65 Wall Street, with modern paintings and a marble spiral staircase and a reception hall paneled in white and gold. It had not been enough for Tilney to make himself the finest securities lawyer in New York. For every sixty minutes dedicated to the law he had to devote twenty to administration. He had to be a housekeeper, a headmaster, a führer.
His only concession to the other school was that he looked like one of them. He had a large, shaggy grey head and a strong, furrowed, pensive face, and his bulging shoulders and thick frame, usually covered in unpressed tweed, were supported on long thin legs and matchstick ankles. But whether he was being charming as an after-dinner speaker, or stern with troublemakers at a stockholders’ meeting, or whimsically philosophical with the chosen group of his favorite clerks, his “disciples,” as they were known in the office, he liked to think that his associates recognized that, however speculative and adventurous they found his mind, it was still an instrument capable of recalling the difference in price between roller towels and evaporating units for the washrooms.
Every leader must be prepared to tolerate expressions of individuality where they are harmless or even useful, and Tilney had had the wisdom to interfere as little as possible with such prima donnas as the litigators. But there was one member of the firm in whose continued independence of action he saw something more dangerous than the theatrical gesticulations dear to the hearts of trial lawyers. Francis Hyde, a thin, bald, bony, long-jawed old bachelor, as morose as he was dusty, represented that almost extinct species, the nonspecialist lawyer. He would take on anything, without consulting his partners, from a corporate reorganization to a scandalous murder trial, and he blandly regarded Tilney’s reorganized firm, in which he found himself a rare survivor from the old Tower days, as a mere depot to supply him with stationery and law clerks. Worse still, he made no secret of his contempt for the senior partner’s high concept of the role of the bar in modern society. Lawyers to Francis Hyde were simple opportunists, and he considered as hypocrites those who argued otherwise. A client’s case was no more than the hand that he had been dealt. Whether or not he could win it was an elementary question of skill, as in the bridge rubbers that he played night after night over too many whiskeys in the Hone Club where he had lived for thirty-five years.
“When he came to Tower & Strong we were a law firm,” Hyde used sneeringly to say of Clitus Tilney. “Now we’re a boys’ church school.”
Matters between the two were brought to a crisis on the spring outing at the Glenville Beach Club. As Tilney was passing through the bar, after playing his eighteen holes of golf, he noticed a little group of associates, still in their city clothes, who must have been passing the beautiful morning drinking in their dark cool corner, and his lips tightened with the disgust of one whose faith was in hard play when it was not in hard work. It did not surprise him to spot Francis Hyde’s gleaming pate at the end of the table, the only partner in the nonathletic little group. As Tilney paused now, perspiring freely, his sweater and flannels a reproach to their urban darkness, all the eyes at the table turned on him. But if there was in Tilney’s gaze, unconcealed by his perfunctory grin, some of the sternness of Abraham contemplating Sodom, there was no corresponding guilt in those answering eyes. To his surprise and indignation he found himself surveyed as if he were something quaint and ridiculous, a sort of vaudeville character, vaguely suggestive of Edwardian sports and fatuity, of blazers and straw hats and boating on rivers. They might have expected him to tip his hat forward over one eyebrow, tuck a cane under his arm, wink and burst into a song about playing the game. It came over him that they must have been actually talking about him, for the sudden silence of their concerted stare conveyed an awkward sense of interruption.
“I don’t know what I’m going to do about these fellows, Clitus,” Hyde called over in his harsh nasal tone. “All they want to do is booze. How are they ever going to make the varsity team in Tower, Tilney?”
The laugh that followed had the boldness of a rebel group that has found at last a leader. Tilney turned aside without a word and pursued his way to the locker room. But in that brief moment he had made, and made finally, his grim decision. He could no longer afford to wait for Hyde’s retirement.
There was considerable discussion in Wall Street at just this time over the contested will of Harry P. Granger, the president of a great drug firm, who had left an estate of forty million, half to his widow and half to the Granger Foundation. He had had no children, but a sister, Mrs. Crimmins, a whining, petulant creature whose six sons had been educated by the decedent and who had herself been provided for in his lifetime, had chosen to attack the will as the product of undue influence. Tilney had followed the proceedings with a lively interest because Mrs. Granger, the widow, had been a childhood friend of his in Ulrica, a small, upstate town.
“We have an interesting situation here,” he announced at the weekly partners’ lunch in a private dining room at the Down Town Association. “This Crimmins woman is making a tour of the big firms looking for someone shady enough to take her case. It really puts it
up to them, because no matter how little she has to go on, she can always settle for something.”
“What makes you so sure she has nothing to go on?” Waldron Webb, the senior litigator, demanded. “If you were a court lawyer, Clitus, you’d learn not to be so positive.”
“But I knew Harry Granger well,” Tilney explained. “A violent man, but an utterly sane one. And one who knew exactly what he wanted to do with every penny he’d earned.”
“Well, if she has no case, why should the executors settle? Or do you just assume they can’t be bothered to work for their commissions?”
“No, it’s not that. I know the executors. They’re all right. But nobody likes to take chances with forty million bucks. Haven’t you always told me, Waldron, that juries are unpredictable? Besides, it may be cheaper to pay Mrs. Crimmins off than to win the case. While it’s going on, the executors can’t qualify. That means there has to be a temporary administration, and the Granger Drug Company, which Harry controlled, would be run in the Surrogate’s Court. Any businessman knows that a few months of that would cost more than even a whacking settlement. It’s simply another example of the way our law favors the grabbers and shysters.”
At this point the nasal drawl of Francis Hyde came down the table to Tilney’s astonished ears: “It may interest you to know, Clitus, that you have just described a client of this office as a grabber and one of your own partners as a shyster. I agreed only last night to represent Mrs. Crimmins in her honest efforts to rectify the injustice done her by her brother’s will.”
In the profound silence that followed, Tilney knew that every eye at the table was on him. But he stared back only at Hyde, fascinated by the bleak cynicism in the latter’s long, arrogant leathery face. “Do you think you should have made that decision without consulting the firm?” he asked now in a mild tone. “Do you think you should have taken on a client so controversial without asking your partners?”
“She’s only controversial to you, Clitus,” Hyde retorted, “because you’ve made up your mind about her case without knowing the facts. I wonder if she appears so bad to the rest of us.” He turned now to address the table. “Here’s a man with one of the great fortunes of the city, who cuts out his closest blood relative to leave more to his widow than she could ever spend. Who are we to say that his only sister isn’t entitled to her day in court?” He paused for effect and then actually dared to wink. “Particularly when I’ve taken her on a contingent fee basis under which we are to receive fifty percent of any recovery.” There was a gasp around the table. “Some of you gentlemen who thought that Clitus was a bit grandiose in moving into our sumptuous new quarters may be less inclined to slam our expensive front door in the face of a poor supplicant like Mrs. Crimmins.”
Tilney glanced around the table and saw at once that his partners were not prepared to condemn Hyde. It was not only that the new rent was high; they were not inclined to take moral issues seriously where women were the litigants. In his sudden violent anger he knew he would go too far. “Look,” he said curtly, “it’s a question of what you are, what you stand for. It depends on what your philosophy of being a lawyer is. Do you want to be the kind of person who helps society to make a better thing of itself, or do you want to make your money out of simple blackmail?”
This was followed by an outburst from the whole table.
“Really, Clitus,” Morris Madison, the senior tax partner objected, “isn’t that a bit rough on Frank? Is it so unreasonable for the closest blood relative to expect some remembrance in an estate of that size?”
“I think these foundations get entirely too much anyhow,” Waldron Webb broke in. “It’s become a racket.”
“Wouldn’t the sister have taken half the estate if there’d been no will?” somebody asked.
“But there was a will,” Tilney exclaimed impatiently. “It’s only a question of what Harry Granger wanted to do with his money. And it’s clear as daylight that he didn’t want to leave Mrs. Crimmins a red cent!”
“But you’re begging the question,” Madison pointed out reasonably. “How do you know that Granger was in the full possession of his faculties when he signed the will?”
“Because I knew Granger!” Tilney almost shouted. “Anyone who knew Granger knew that he was sane!”
The constrained silence that followed this second explosion was of a painful duration. It was almost a relief to everybody to have it broken, even by Francis Hyde’s mocking tone. “However well our friend Clitus knew the late Mr. Granger, he obviously did not know him well enough to be his lawyer. And that would be the only thing that would keep me from accepting Mrs. Crimmins’ retainer. Docs anyone but Mr. Tilney disagree with me?”
Tilney, correctly reading his defeat in the renewal of silence around him, was unable to resist a last fling at his opponent. “If I know Margaret Granger, you may have bitten off more than you can chew. I doubt if she’ll settle, even if it costs her double to lick you!”
“With admirable foresight the late Mr. Granger did not make his widow an executor,” Hyde retorted, smiling down the table. “I have two very realistic officers of the Granger Drug Company to deal with. You said yourself, Clitus, that they were all right. But I tell you what. If I settle this case for a penny under four hundred grand—which is a mere one percent of the gross estate—I’ll be glad to tender you my resignation from the firm.”
“You’d better be careful,” Tilney muttered grimly. “I just may accept it.”
For several minutes thereafter there was no sound at the table but the chink of silver and the lapping of soup, and the dirty joke with which Waldron Webb at length broke the silence was greeted with a burst of relieved laughter.
The next months were terrible ones for Clitus Tilney. Hyde initiated in the Surrogate’s Court a lengthy series of pretrial examinations, or what was known in the legal world as a “fishing expedition.” He examined and re-examined, with exhaustive and exhausting care, the three witnesses to Mr. Granger’s will, but he uncovered nothing but the fact that the decedent had drunk two cocktails—after the execution of the document. He interrogated the servants in the house, the nurses and doctors who had attended Granger’s last illness, and the employees of the drug company whom the president had known personally. He showed particular interest in any evidence of the frequent manifestations of the decedent’s lively temper. But above all he procrastinated. He complained to the court about his difficulties in rounding up witnesses; he pleaded illnesses and accidents; he insisted mysteriously that he was on the trail of new leads. He made motion after motion and appealed from decisions denying them. As Tilney put it disgustedly to his wife, the whole procedure, written up, would have made a perfect textbook for incipient shysters in the art of delaying tactics. The surrogate was impatient, the press caustic and the executors and their counsel livid, but time passed, and time, of course, was Hyde’s trump card.
Reaching deeper and deeper into waters that he himself had muddied, Hyde at last plucked out one small, faintly wriggling eel, in the form of a modest trust fund that Granger had set up years before for a retired actress who had presumably been at one point his mistress. By showing that his client, Mrs. Crimmins, had been a friend of the actress, Hyde sought to establish a basis for Mrs. Granger’s “psychopathic hatred” of her sister-in-law and her reason for “hounding the decedent until he had removed his sister from the will.” At this point Mrs. Granger, driven to exasperation by her own long interrogations, snapped in answer to one of Hyde’s sneering questions that Mrs. Crimmins was “a cheat and a liar.” The words hit the headlines of the evening papers, and people began to shrug and say that the case was simply a mud-slinging competition between two angry women. When Hyde announced confidentially at a firm lunch that he had received a settlement offer of half a million, Tilney, sick at heart, assumed that all was over.
That evening he and his wife went to a private harpsichord concert in an old brownstone on lower Park Avenue. He had hoped that the music would
settle his nerves, but he found that the twanging exasperated him, and he slipped out to the dining room where the butler, an old friend, gave him a whiskey and soda. He had settled down to drink it when he saw approaching him across the empty chamber the small, neat, grey, compact figure of Margaret Granger. So might Queen Victoria have crossed a room, with dignity, with intent, with relentlessness. As he rose to greet her, he noticed how everything about her, her pale round unpowdered cheeks, her thin, pale, set lips, her straight grey hair held in a knot in back, her simple satin grey dress and slippers, her single strand of tiny pearls, proclaimed, and proclaimed sincerely, that her money was but a burden and a duty.
“Sit down, Clitus,” she said severely, “I want to have a word with you.” They sat facing each other, on two high-backed Italian chairs, while she eyed him for a cool moment. “I’d like to know what you think you’re up to.”
“I’m up to very little. My partner, Mr. Hyde, seems to be up to more.”
“He’s a disgrace to the bar!”
Tilney glanced stealthily to his left and right and then leaned forward to whisper hoarsely: “I agree with you!”
“No, Clitus, I won’t let you joke your way out of this. I really won’t. He’s your partner, and you should have stopped him. You owed me that much, as an old friend.”
“I tried, Margaret, believe me. My partners wouldn’t go along.”
“I thought you were the senior.”
“There’s a limit to what we seniors can do.”
“Well, I don’t understand it,” she said, shaking her head. “But I should think there was some way a man in your position could have stopped it. And now I suppose you’ll get a large fee?”
“Hyde gets no fee at all if he loses the case, and he can’t possibly win if you fight. What’s all this settlement talk? Have your lawyers lost their guts?”
Mrs. Granger was taken aback by his sudden offensive. “They tell me it costs less to settle. No matter how sure we are of winning.”
“And is costing less the only criterion?” Tilney protested. “Is there no moral issue involved?”
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