Powers of Attorney

by Louis Auchincloss

  “You talk to me of moral issues, Clitus!” she exclaimed indignantly. “You, the partner of a man who’s dragged my poor Harry’s name through the mire!”

  “Yes, I talk to you of moral issues, Margaret!” he retorted. “I have the unmitigated gall, if you will, to remind you of your moral obligation, as Harry’s widow, not to give away a penny of his hard-earned money to his swindling sister.”

  Mrs. Granger really gaped at this. “Your client,” she murmured in astonishment. “Is that the way you talk about your clients?”

  “When I tell you that it could get me into the hottest kind of water with the Bar Association, will you believe I’m sincere?”

  Mrs. Granger leaned over now to rest her small hand for just a moment on top of his large one. “Oh, Clitus, my good old friend, forgive me. Tell me what I should do.” Her voice trembled. “Everyone keeps telling me it’s best to settle the wretched thing. They talk about the publicity and the cost, and they tell me that Harry’s foundation will pay Mrs. Crimmins out of its half of the estate, so it won’t make any difference to me, anyway. But I don’t care about the publicity and the cost. And I don’t care about who pays what. All I care is that Harry’s horrible sister and her horrible lawyer should not be rewarded for what they’ve done to his memory. And I know that Harry would gladly have paid out his last dollar to lick them!”

  “You believe that?”

  “Passionately!” she exclaimed and clasped her hands together. “Oh, Clitus, tell me what to do.”

  He hesitated a moment. “Do you still walk your poodles in the park in the early morning?”

  She stared. “Yes. Every morning at seven.”

  “I’ll meet you tomorrow at seven. At the Ninetieth Street gate.”

  They both rose in startled guilt at the sudden burst of applause from the next room. It was the intermission.

  Tilney, of course, had made a careful study of the Granger will. It was a simple document, perfectly designed by competent counsel to effectuate the testator’s twofold design: to provide sumptuously for his widow and to deprive the United States of its last penny of tax. The primary function of the Granger Foundation, at least in the mind of its benefactor, was less the study of incurable diseases than keeping the money away from the federal bureaucrats. And so the forty millions had been divided neatly in half, without a single outside bequest: twenty outright to the Granger Foundation, and twenty in trust to the widow for her life and then to the Foundation. But to qualify the widow’s trust for the widow’s tax exemption it had been necessary for Granger’s lawyers to give her a power to dispose of her trust by will. Of course, it was understood between her and her husband that she would not exercise this power and that on her death the foundation would come into possession of the reunited halves of the estate, still virgin to the tax collector. Nonetheless, she had it. She had it, and on this Tilney had based his little plan.

  The morning of his meeting with Mrs. Granger was a bright mild day of early spring, and seated on a park bench watching the pigeons and squirrels, Tilney felt as exhilarated as a young man at a romantic assignation. He jumped up when he saw her approaching, with her three absurd miniature poodles, and, taking the dogs’ leashes, led her to a bench.

  “Give me the little darlings, Margaret, and take this pencil and paper. I want to dictate a letter of just three lines. To the Director of the Granger Foundation. Of course, you will wish to add your own embellishments. But so long as the final version contains the gist of my message, we’ll be all right, and Frank Hyde will be all wrong.”

  “Dear Clitus,” she murmured affectionately as she sat down, “what a true friend you are. I wonder if having my faith restored in you isn’t worth as much to me as frustrating Mrs. Crimmins.”

  “You can have both,” he assured her as she took the pad and pencil and waited. “Now then. ‘Dear Bill or Jim, or whatever you call him: This is to inform you of my irrevocable decision.’” He paused and smiled while she hastily scribbled. “‘If a single penny of my husband’s estate, or any money previously contributed by him to the Granger Foundation, is, under any circumstances whatever, given to Mrs. Crimmins …’” He paused again, this time even longer than was needed.

  “Go on, Clitus!”

  “‘I will immediately execute a new will, by the terms of which the entire principle of my trust will be given to charities other than the Granger Foundation.’”

  Mrs. Granger scribbled busily until she had finished, but when she looked up, she was frowning. “I couldn’t do it. I gave Harry my word.”

  “And, of course, I wouldn’t ask you to break it. But you never promised Harry you wouldn’t do a little bluffing, did you? You never gave him your word that you wouldn’t try to trick his foundation into showing a little backbone?”

  “No,” she said doubtfully. “I didn’t. The matter never came up. Do you think he’d have approved of that kind of stratagem?”

  “I think he’d have been tickled pink. I think he’d have clapped his hands and shouted!”

  “And you really think this…” She glanced down at the pad on which she had scribbled his message. “You really think it will work?”

  “It will work like a charm. Can you imagine a foundation tossing away twenty sure millions to save a possible few hundred grand? They’re not madmen, you know. Even if they suspected you were bluffing, how would they dare take the chance that you weren’t?”

  As the beauty of the scheme sank into her mind, she smiled at last at this vision of the perfect weapon. “But then it will cost your firm a great fee,” she protested. “Is there any way I can make it up to you? Can I give you a fee?”

  Tilney threw back his head with a roar of laughter. “My dear Margaret, what sort of crook do you take me for? Haven’t I been unethical enough for one day?” He rose and reached out a hand. “Come now. Go home and write that letter. Make me proud of you. That’s all the fee I could ever ask.”

  The next days were delectable ones for Tilney. He never missed the chance, passing Hyde in a corridor, to boom a hearty question at him as to how the great case was going, and he would chuckle loudly at the other’s evasive and discomfited answers. After a fortnight had passed, he felt that it was time, at a firm lunch, to call down the table to Hyde for a report on the Granger case.

  “When you last spoke of it,” he added, “you told us it was as good as settled. Has the agreement been signed?”

  Hyde stared back at him with unconcealed malevolence. “I suppose the word’s out by now that the settlement has fallen through.” He snorted in disgust as he directed a less baleful stare around the table at the other partners. “I was going to tell you all today, anyway. Frankly, gentlemen, it’s the damndest thing that’s ever happened to me. The agreement was all hashed out, typed and ready to sign. We’d even told the surrogate about it in chambers. And then, whambo, somebody gets cold feet, the widow or the foundation, and refuses to go through with it. Oh, I can tell you, their counsel’s face was really red. Old John Gales, of Gales & Martin, admitted to me he was thunderstruck. He actually apologized!”

  “What are they trying to do?” Waldron Webb demanded hotly. “Shake you down a hundred grand at the last moment? It’s the most unscrupulous thing I ever heard!”

  “That may be it, I don’t know. But Gales says they won’t settle for a penny. Somebody seems to have got religion on the Granger Foundation.”

  “In that case, what do we do now?” Tilney demanded, frowning. “Fold our tents and steal away?”

  “No such luck, Clitus,” Hyde retorted angrily. “If it’s a fight they want, they’ll get a fight. And if it’s dirt they want, they’ll get their fill!”

  “That’s a pleasant prospect,” said Tilney with an acid smile. “But first of all, there’s one little matter that I feel obliged to bring to the attention of the firm. I note on the monthly statement that more than thirteen thousand dollars of cash disbursements have been charged to Mrs. Crimmins’ account. Of course, I understand th
at the fee basis is contingent, and that we get nothing if we lose, but you must surely know, Frank, that lawyers can’t pay clients’ disbursements. Isn’t that champerty?”

  “What am I expected to do? Mrs. Crimmins hasn’t got that kind of money.”

  “Well, Mrs. Crimmins had better find it, I’m afraid,” Tilney continued in a sharper tone. “She’d better beg, borrow or steal it. The firm has suffered enough from the bad publicity of this case without having the Grievance Committee of the City Bar breathing down our neck. In the meanwhile I have given the cashier instructions that no further sums are to be charged to that account.”

  “Does that mean,” Hyde demanded irately, “that I can no longer sign a chit for a taxi to go to court?”

  “It means precisely that. If you go to court on the Granger case.”

  Hyde pushed his chair roughly back and strode from the room while the partners exchanged uneasy glances.

  “Does anyone think I’m wrong?” Tilney demanded in his highest, most challenging tone. “Does anyone want to see us continue in champertous practices?”

  “I’m sure nobody thinks you’re wrong, Clitus,” Morris Madison put in in his reasonable tone. “But I do think it was a bit rough on Frank, springing it that way. He’ll have to make up those disbursements out of his own pocket.”

  “Well, I don’t want to know about it if he does,” Tilney exclaimed. “It’s just as bad for him to do it as the firm.”

  “You won’t know it,” Madison said quietly. “He’ll simply deposit the money in Mrs. Crimmins’ checking account, and she’d pay us. Frank may love his booze, and he may be crusty, but he’ll give a client the shirt off his back. And he’s not a rich man, either.”

  “You’re breaking my heart,” Tilney sneered, and he was defiantly glad to note, taking in the table with a rapid glance as he lowered his head over his soup bowl, that he had shocked them all.

  Hyde was good to his word about giving the Granger estate a fight full of dirt, and the trial attracted even more publicity than the pretrial hearings. Tilney was sure that his partner had privately hired a press agent and fervently prayed that the latter’s bill would be a large one. But for all the dirt and the headlines, for all the weeks of idle testimony, for all the tricks and chicaneries, the defense remained adamant. The legal world found such intransigency hard to understand. It was widely rumored that Hyde had offered to settle for less than half the sum originally tendered him, and the executors made no secret of their dissatisfaction at having their hands tied by legatees. The other stockholders of the Granger Drug Company, worried by the effect of the delayed probate on the affairs of the corporation, had appealed in vain to the widow, and an editorial appeared in a morning paper questioning the right of a charitable foundation to spend more of its money in litigation than a settlement would cost. It was no use. The board of trustees of the Granger Foundation, with a disregard of public opinion unique in the gentle field of charities, issued a statement to the press that because of “the aspersions cast on the name of their distinguished founder,” not even a nominal settlement would be considered.

  After that Hyde’s case, if case it could be really called, collapsed. When he had called the last of his witnesses, the estate moved for a directed verdict which the surrogate granted. Six weeks later the Appellate Division unanimously rejected Hyde’s appeal and denied him leave to appeal higher. Two months after that the Court of Appeals in Albany refused to hear his appeal, and Harry P. Granger’s fortune was safe at last from the attacks of his sister and her embittered counsel. Clitus Tilney felt a greater exultation in his heart than he had known at the most splendid of his firm’s past triumphs.

  Only a week after the end of the Granger case Tilney was dressing at home to attend a dinner at the Bar Association in honor of the visiting Lord Chancellor of England. Ada Tilney, whose high pale brow under her faded straight brown hair, parted in the middle in mid-Victorian fashion, was like a rock washed clean by the years of his absences, absences at conventions, testimonial dinners, committee meetings, or simply at the office, sat beside his dresser, fitting the pearl studs in his shirt.

  “I left something on the bureau for you,” she said in her placid tone. “Have you seen it yet?”

  Tilney noticed a magazine, folded open under his silver-handled hairbrush, and picked it up. It was the Gotham Gazette, a periodical sent out free to addresses east of Central Park for the sake of the fashionable advertising. Tilney saw the title of an article, “Early-morning Dog-walking” and beneath it a small photograph of Mrs. Granger and her poodles. Behind her, of course, loomed himself, although he was not identified in the caption which read: “Mrs. Harry P. Granger, widow of the drug magnate, is up and out with her ‘toy’ poodles as early as seven o’clock.”

  “Most women seem to have trouble with their husbands going out at night,” Ada continued. “It’s so like you to make time for infidelity only in the early morning.”

  “Ada, you’re wonderful!” he exclaimed with a chuckle as he tossed the magazine in the scrap basket. “Let me tell you something funny about that picture. There is someone who might make trouble about it. But that someone doesn’t happen to be you.”

  “Still another woman, no doubt.”

  “No, a man.”

  The sudden hint of grimness in his tone aroused her apprehension. “Oh, Clitus, does it have something to do with that horrible case? Is it Frank Hyde?”

  “It’s Frank, all right.” He took his shirt from her. “But do you know something, Ada? I’m a man who’s missed two wars. Too young for the first and too old for the second. I’ve always wondered how I would have behaved under fire. Well, tonight perhaps, I shall find out.”

  “But surely Frank would never see a silly magazine like that?”

  “There are those in the office who would be only too glad to send it to him. Besides, it’s elementary in military intelligence to assume that the enemy knows anything he could have known.”

  As Tilney entered the long somber portrait-lined reception hall of the Bar Association, filled with black ties and grey heads, Chambers Todd, straight nosed, square jawed, black haired, the “business getting” partner of the office, came up to complain about Hyde.

  “He’s over there, talking to Judge Caulkins,” he said with a brief nod of his head towards a corner. “He’s half plastered already. Something’s got to be done about him, Clitus. He’s giving the firm a terrible black eye. Suppose he passes out at an affair like this?”

  But nothing could dull the curious sense of elation that his little talk with Ada had given Tilney. “It wouldn’t be what Madison Avenue calls a good ‘image,’ would it?” he asked with a rumbling laugh. “Think of it. Whenever the words Tower, Tilney & Webb’ are uttered, the picture flashed on the mental screen is one of an elderly man, inebriated, sinking slowly to his knees.”

  “I’m glad you find it so funny,” Todd retorted.

  “Leave him to me, Chambers. I’ll go and speak to him now.”

  As Tilney approached, Judge Caulkins greeted him with the fulsomeness of one anxious to escape an embarrassing colloquy. Hyde, swaying slightly, stared after the retreating jurist with narrowed eyes. He did not look at Tilney.

  “What do you want?” he muttered.

  “I’d like to persuade you to shift to soda water. Just until dinner, old man.”

  “Don’t ‘old man’ me. You had the gall to talk to me about champerty. What about betraying one’s own client? Which is worse?” Hyde turned suddenly on Tilney and almost shouted as he repeated the question. “Which?”

  “Do you imply that I betrayed a client?” Tilney asked calmly. “Whom?”

  “You tricked Mrs. Crimmins out of half a million bucks! By some kind of rinky-dink with Mrs. Granger. What do you think the Grievance Committee will think of that?”

  “Ask them.”

  Hyde steadied himself against the back of the sofa. “Do you know how many copies of that picture I found on my desk this morning? Th
ree!”

  “My wife had one for me,” Tilney announced with a laugh. “She had a couple of questions herself.” His spirits rose to a peak as he felt the dizzy joy of danger, and he regretted the wars he had missed. “But if you think you can make something out of my old friendship with Margaret Granger, by all means go ahead. Drag the poor woman to the Grievance Committee. Drag me. And don’t blame anyone but Francis Hyde when you’ve made the biggest fool of yourself in all New York!”

  Hyde’s watery eyes began to twitch. He glanced around at the bar. “I think I’ll get myself one more little drink before we go in.”

  Tilney laughed again, an elated laugh, as he saw that he had won. And won, too, not in the sneaky way of his conference in the park, but with all his cards on the table. There was bluffing indeed! But the foe had not only to be routed; he had to be destroyed. “Tarry, Frank,” he called softly after him, and the other turned back in surprise. “You and I can’t go on this way. You have threatened me, and we can no longer be partners. You promised to resign from the firm if you lost the Granger case. I should like to invoke that promise now.”

  Hyde’s eyes peered at Tilney as if he had not fully grasped his meaning. “Have you discussed this with the firm?”

  “They can choose between you and me.”

  “I see.” Hyde nodded vaguely. “Between you and me.”

  “I would assume that an adequate pension would be arranged for whichever has to go.”

  “An adequate pension,” Hyde mumbled with a thickening tone. “Yes, no doubt.”

  Tilney watched him as he ambled off to the bar, and for the first time it occurred to him that Hyde might be an object of pity. He seemed old now and frail, and the prospect of lonely days as well as nights at the Hone Club seemed dismal enough. Still, there might be work that the firm could send him, or legal aid, or committee work for the Bar Association, or even writing law review articles. And the pension would be adequate; he would see to that.