Powers of Attorney

by Louis Auchincloss

  He saw that Hyde was arguing with the bartender, who was reluctant to give him another drink. The dining room doors were open, and the guests were beginning to move forward.

  “Look at him, Clitus! Shall I take him home?”

  It was Todd again at his elbow, and Tilney in a single grim second saw all the fatuity of his own reasoning. Frank Hyde was doomed to a lonely, miserable, alcoholic old age, and nothing on earth was going to alter that doom. But was it any sadder than the withering of a leaf or the eating of flesh by carnivores? The senior partner of Tower, Tilney & Webb had not created the universe.

  “Oh, God, there he goes!” moaned Todd as Hyde fell suddenly forward on the bar table. The noise was slight and attracted only the notice of those in the immediate vicinity, but when Hyde tried to get up his right arm suddenly swept a whole tray of glasses to the floor, and the hideous crash brought silence to the entire vast chamber.

  “There’s your image, Todd!” Tilney called after the younger man who was hurrying to help their fallen partner. He resisted the impulse to go himself. He would spare Hyde the final mortification of having the victor help him to his feet. It was probably the last mortification that it would be in his power to spare him.

  Power of Suggestion

  LIKE many of the associates of Tower, Tilney & Webb, Jake Platt came from the Middle West—Winnetka, Illinois—and lived during the first bachelor years of his legal apprenticeship in Greenwich Village. He spent many of his free evenings in discussion groups and of his weekend afternoons in soft-ball games with the boys at St. Martin’s Settlement House, but after he had resolved upon the serious courtship of Leila Frisby, a dark-haired, wide-eyed Bennington graduate who was determined to make her way off-Broadway, he haunted the fringes of Bohemia. Her friends accepted him because he was handsome and silent and because his easy, pipe-smoking, blond, American masculinity made a pleasant background for discussions of Rothko and Sartres. And then, too, he was helpful about leases and contracts, and for those of them who cared, the income tax. What they did not know was that behind the tireless twinkle of those ceaselessly surveying grey eyes lay the serene conviction that they were dilettantes without any real existence and that once Leila had married him and moved to the red-brick truth of Stuyvesant Town and given birth to the first of a planned family of three, she would have no more time, as he put it to himself, to “wait for Godot.”

  Nor was his prediction unfulfilled. After Leila had become Mrs. Platt and the mother of little Jock, she began to be more critical of her old friends. They failed to recognize the pull of her new responsibilities, and if she and Jake wouldn’t stay at a party till dawn, they didn’t seem to care if she came at all. Thus the connection with Bohemia was gradually dissolved without Jake’s having once to suggest it. But what he had not anticipated was that her abandonment of old affiliations did not bring with it any immediate enthusiasm for new ones. Leila viewed the Saturday night supper parties which they now attended, made up entirely of young lawyers and their wives, mostly from Tower, Tilney & Webb, with a more jaundiced eye than he quite liked.

  “It’s bad enough with the men,” she complained on their way home from one of these, “though at least one expects them to talk shop. But Margy Schlide! She keeps it up even with the girls. She told me tonight that Barry had to make partner this year or never and that his chances were exactly two out of five.”

  “How does she figure that out? I would have said they weren’t one in a hundred.”

  “Because he didn’t go to Harvard, I suppose.” Leila had preserved intact from her Village days the prejudice that firms like Tower, Tilney & Webb selected their partners exclusively from Harvard.

  “No, of course not. Relatively few of the associates went to Harvard. I didn’t go to Harvard myself.”

  “No, but you might as well have. You have that cool, snooty look that poor Barry will never develop.”

  Jake paused to control his irritation and to recapture the look which his wife had described. “It’s not the way Barry looks or talks that’s against him,” he explained in a judicial tone. “The powers that be aren’t so superficial. It’s the way he acts.”

  “How?”

  “Well, he calls even the young partners ‘sir’ for example. And he doubles up with laughter every time one of them makes a joke. He’s always polishing the apple. That sort of thing doesn’t go downtown.”

  “You mean, if it’s too obvious?”

  “No, Leila, I don’t mean that at all. Naturally, none of us wants to be an associate all his life. But most of the boys expect to make the grade by hard work and not politics. If Barry Schlide became a partner, he’d turn Tower, Tilney into a kind of Oriental court, with bowing and salaaming and stabbing in the back.”

  “Poor Barry and Marg,” said Leila wistfully. “I see them wandering about in their turbans amid all the grey flannel suits. But is that what’s wrong with them? Are they the only ones in costume, or are they the only ones who aren’t? And why do you all care so?”

  Jake did not answer; in his opinion the discussion had gone quite far enough. It was inevitable that Leila, with her quick, inquiring mind, should eventually find out the truth about the legal and business worlds, about all worlds, for that matter, but he wanted it to come little by little. It was not in the least that he was ashamed of the truth or of his own ambition. Every man who was worth his salt cared, pretty much to the exclusion of anything else, about his own promotion. What else mattered, in the anthill which the world was becoming, but to acquire a bit of space for oneself and one’s family? But it was difficult for most people, particularly people who had spent so much of their lives “waiting for Godot,” to understand this. They clung to other values which, perfectly obviously, failed to make them happy. One had only to look about at Leila’s old friends. And it was because the Barry Schlides, by talking and carrying on the way Leila had been erroneously led to believe that downtown people talked and carried on, confirmed her in her prejudice that Jake found them so objectionable.

  Originally, he had regarded Barry as a mere clown. That round, red, rubbery beaming face, topped by the balding dome over which the sparse long hairs were so carefully pasted back, looming up in the center of groups at cocktails to proclaim in a high shrill voice the Schlide victories over Uncle Sam in the Court of Claims or the Tax Court, had seemed to Jake simply ridiculous. Yet he had learned that there was something about Barry, despite his outrageous conceit and his blatant toadying, despite his never-ending loquacity and his abominable jokes, that made the other clerks put up with him, at times even like him. There was an infectious quality in the intimacy that he thrust upon one, in his unfailing good humor, even in his bland assumption that one was in the identical craft with himself. And then, too, he was certainly a good tax lawyer.

  But a partner? Did Margy Schlide who, after all, was nobody’s fool, seriously believe that Barry was going to be a partner? Jake thought of himself as an expert in such matters, keeping a secret file in his desk that listed all the members of the firm since 1925, with statistics of their states of origin, law schools, legal specialties, religions, social backgrounds and whether or not they were possessed of independent means. He could think of no precedent in his file to encourage the Schlides.

  “Horace,” he asked his office mate the following Monday morning, “have you ever stopped to consider Barry Schlide’s future in the firm?”

  Their desks faced opposite walls, but the slap of Horace’s tilted chair against the floor was ample statement of his interest. Horace Mason was a stout, bald, didactic young man, the office politician, but the general assumption that he was apprenticed to Tower, Tilney only until he had reached an age to take up a partnership in his father’s firm, Mason, Winthrop & Sears, gave to his opinions a detachment that made him the associates’ oracle.

  “Funny you should say that. I was just thinking of Barry. He wanted to know if my old man would put him up for the Midday Club. Imagine! When he’s never even met him. B
ut I wonder if Barry’s very lack of guile might not turn out to be his strongest asset.”

  “He’s so different.”

  “Ah, but that’s just it, Jake, old man. That’s what you don’t see with all your graphs and charts. We live in an age where it’s the fashion to break precedents.”

  “What do you know about my charts?” Jake demanded heatedly. “Have you been looking in my desk?”

  “Of course I have,” Horace retorted calmly. “As you’ve been looking in mine. But that’s aside from the point. The point is that this firm is properly concerned with its reputation of being a bit on the social side. Having Barry as a partner might balance things out.”

  Jake turned morosely back to his work, remembering Horace’s earlier prediction that the firm would make only one partner that year. And who had earned it more than Jake Platt? Who was more qualified by his industry, his tenure in office, his undisputed position as Clitus Tilney’s “fair-haired boy,” by the fact that he had never made an enemy, that he was as popular with the office boys as with the partners, that he was handsome Jake, serious Jake, smiling Jake, a fixture in Tower, Tilney who never blinked if asked to work around the clock yet who organized the sports on the firm outing? All the vectors on the partnership graph laid out now on the blotter of his desk pointed to what should occur that Christmas: the happy exclusion of Jake from the long list of those running up to Clitus Tilney’s office to be told of their mere annual raises, the breathless hiatus, the final summoning, the twinkle, the hand on the shoulder, the hand in Jake’s hand, the explanation, with a gruff chuckle, of why there would be no further talk of raises. And Barry Schlide would get all that? Barry Schlide would take his place and feel the pressure of that near-paternal grip under the puffy shoulder pads of his vulgarly cut coat? Jake was so upset that he did not pick up his telephone until the third ring.

  “Oh, Jake,” came his master’s voice, “this merger of Standard Trust with Bank of Commerce, if it ever comes off, is going to have tax headaches, along with everything else. I think we’d better have a first-class tax man at the meeting on Thursday. Have you anyone to suggest?”

  “What about Schlide?”

  “Schlide?” There was a faint note of surprise in Tilney’s high, smooth tone. “Oh, all right, Schlide. See if you can get him.”

  “I’ll get him all right.”

  “Good. And Jake?”

  “Yes, sir?” He found it perfectly consistent to use this title of address alternately with “Clitus.” So, evidently, did Tilney.

  “My spies tell me you’ve been overdoing it. Down here every night last week. I want you to get some rest before the merger talks and go home to that lovely wife of yours. Promise?”

  I promise, sir.

  Jake’s plan of pushing Barry into the face of the senior partner, for whom he had never directly worked, so that Tilney would see him in all his horribleness and not accept, secondhand, the opinion of the easily flattered tax chief, Mr. Madison, had been conceived in a split second, but looking around the conference in Tilney’s office on Thursday morning he felt that he had no reason to regret it. Tilney, so smooth and big in the dark blue, almost black suit that fell, creaseless, from his broad shoulders to his thin ankles, so formidably cerebral with his wide brow, his long, wide-nostriled nose and the rimless pince-nez clamped to its tiny bridge, so authoritative with his thunderous coughs and habit of slapping a broad silver paper cutter on the blotter of his desk, loomed over the group of silent associates like an old bull among yearlings. It was as simple to see that he had grown out of one of them as that they, or at least some of them, would grow into him. But could anything ever come out of, or come of, Barry Schlide? Could anyone fail to note his discrepancy in that chamber: the too light suit, the white tie with blue triangles, the red beaming face that, instead of being bent, like the others, over the printed proofs, was motionlessly erect so that the big drippy eyes could contemplate with rapture the profile of the senior partner?

  “These bank mergers, gentlemen, always bristle with problems,” Tilney was beginning. “And not the least of them, to us anyway, is which bank’s counsel is going to end up representing the merged banks. The Standard Trust boys may be in there rooting for us, but you can be sure Bank of Commerce is rooting just as hard for Mason, Winthrop & Sears. That’s why we must be on our toes. Now here’s a draft letter that Mr. Madison has banged out on the tax features of the merger. It looks pretty good to me, Barry, but I want you to check it out and then clear it with Mr. Sears.”

  With a flick of his wrist he sent a long sheet of paper sliding down the glazed surface of the conference table to Barry who picked it up gingerly and held it before him as tenderly as if he were viewing a rare old scroll.

  “All I can say,” he said after a pause, with a twinkle in his eye and a shy smile down the table, “is that if Mr. Madison wrote this letter and …”; here he paused again to broaden his grin, “and if Mr. Tilney approved it, I doubt if Mr. Schlide is going to find too much to add.”

  “That widow’s mite is what we pay you for,” Tilney said gruffly, and in the ripple of laughter that went around the table Barry’s guffaw was the loudest of all.

  After the conference Jake stayed on in Tilney’s office. The latter had risen and moved to the window, and Jake, having scrutinized the broad, dark back for ten cautious seconds, at last made his venture.

  “I’m sorry about Schlide, Clitus.”

  “Schlide?” Tilney was playing with the curtain cord, and his tone was remote. “What’s he done?”

  “I mean, sorry I suggested him. That business about the letter was a bit thick.”

  “Oh, that.”

  Jake knew all the dangers of depreciating a fellow associate behind his back, but there were times when the most obvious maneuver was in fact the subtlest. “Barry’s got a heart as big as a mountain and a mind like a steel trap,” he allowed, “but he doesn’t do things like other people.” Here he chuckled and jotted a correction on his proof sheet as though only a small part of his mind was occupied by the subject in discussion. “He told Morris Madison that if he and Margy had another baby, of either sex, they were going to call it Morris Schlide.” He paused and felt his breath return when he heard Tilney’s grunt of amusement. “I hope he didn’t embarrass you with that remark about the letter. He meant it so well.”

  Tilney turned to look at him oddly. “What do you take me for, Jake? Of course I didn’t mind. When have you known me to care about anything but how a man does his job? And can’t I count on Barry?”

  “Most certainly.”

  “Then what the hell? Let’s get back to work. What do you think of my rider about the Class-A voting stock?”

  Jake picked up the rider and fingered it in Barry’s gingerly fashion. “If Mr. Tilney wrote it,” he said with a simpering smile, “I doubt if Mr. Jake Platt is going to find too much to add.”

  But this time the maneuver, however subtly obvious, failed. A dry “Cut it out, will you, Jake,” was Tilney’s sole response.

  When he returned to his own office, Jake found Barry waiting to thump him on the back. “I want to thank you, old man, for recommending me to Tilney! It’s the first chance I’ve had to work with him. You’ve got a blank check from Barry Schlide, my boy, a real blank check! How about you and Leila coming over Saturday night for drinks and dinner?”

  “I’m afraid I’m going to have to work Saturday night,” Jake muttered. “I’m afraid you may, too.”

  “Okey-doke! Let’s work!”

  From then on everything went wrong. In the daily conferences in Tilney’s office the center of gravity seemed to be slowly shifting from the big gleaming brow and glittering pince-nez of the senior partner to the ruddy complexion and broad smile of his tax associate. At times they even seemed like a team engaged in a vaudeville act, shouting louder and louder in a desperate effort to amuse their souring audience. If Tilney made a joke, Barry would roar, and roar so long that at last the others, in simple inability
to resist the contagion, would begin, however impatiently, to chuckle, which would have the effect of setting Barry, at last subsiding, off again. Tilney, unaccountably, seemed to find it all very amusing. Sometimes he would frown and grumble: “Let’s cut the clowning and get on with it,” but his admonition would be lost in the high scream of Barry’s renewed laughter which in turn would start off the whole conference table until Tilney, helpless, shrugging, with eyes raised to the ceiling, would succumb again to the wave himself. Even Jake would have to laugh, which at least had the advantage of making his tears of anger seem their opposite.

  Barry’s response to Tilney’s ideas was as violent as to his jokes. The least opinion of the older man gave rise to whistles and cluckings, and the smoke-filled air of the chamber was made even thicker by a flurry of comments such as: “By cricky, I wish I’d said that!” or “Let’s go home, boys, and let the boss finish” or “Where was Mrs. Schlide’s little boy Barry when the brains were parceled out?” It was true that in the beginning Tilney had looked embarrassed, at times even cross, but now he would grin and play the game and even, to the delight of his brash admirer, make sarcastic rejoinders. “Go to the head of the class, Barry!” he would exclaim when the latter had hit upon a solution, or, “Jake, give Barry another gold star!” It was only too evident that the more he saw of Barry, the more he liked him, and that Jake’s little plan was having precisely the opposite effect of what he had intended.

  Wherein had he failed? Certainly not with Barry, who was behaving more repulsively than Jake could have dared hope. No, he at last concluded bitterly, he had failed to realize that Tilney had aged, that he would now forgive the grossest obsequiousness, submit to the most cringing flattery, so long as he could maintain his little fantasy of strutting, a combination of Mr. Pickwick and Joseph H. Choate, a Christmas card figure of Dickensian glow and cheer, before an audience of perpetually applauding Cratchits. Surely in the history of every law firm there had to be a moment, a hovering moment when time paused and when the decision was half consciously made to go on growing or to decline instead into a parasitic existence, like that of the larva of the desert wasp feeding on a paralyzed spider, living on captive clients, on drawn-out estate administrations, on old trust accountings and odd bits of unsettled litigation. And Jake began to wonder sorely if that moment had not come for Tower, Tilney & Webb.