Powers of Attorney

by Louis Auchincloss

  “Is Tomkins covered all right?” the Colonel asked as he touched the bell beside him.

  “He’s covered with the other servants,” Rutherford said hastily. “In my opinion, sir, you’ve been more than generous.”

  The witnesses came up, and the Colonel behaved better than Rutherford had dared hope. He joked with Baitsell about the formalities, laughed at the red ribbon attached to the will, told a couple of anecdotes about old Newport and Harry Lehr’s will, and finally signed his name in a great, flourishing hand. When Rutherford’s secretary walked up to the table to sign her name after his, he rose and made her a courtly bow. It was all like a scene from Thackeray.

  In the taxi afterward, speeding downtown, Rutherford turned to the others. “The Colonel’s a bit funny about his private affairs,” he told them. “As a matter of fact, I haven’t even met his family. So I’d rather you didn’t mention this will business. Outside the office or in.”

  Baitsell looked very young and impressed as he gave him his solemn assurance. He then asked, “But if the Colonel should die, sir, who would notify us? And how would the family know about the will?”

  “Never mind about that,” Rutherford said, with a small smile, handing him the will. “I don’t think the Colonel is apt to do very much dying without my hearing of it. When we get to the office, you stick that will in the vault and forget it.”

  It was risky to warn them, of course, but riskier not to. He couldn’t afford to have them talk. There was too much that was phony in the whole picture. He had no guaranty, after all, that the Colonel had either the money or the power to will it. It was the kind of situation where one had to lie low, at least until the old man was dead, and even after that, until it was clear that one had the final and valid will. How would he look, for example, rushing into court to probate the document now under Baitsell’s arm if the family produced a later will, or even a judicial ruling that the old man was incompetent to make one? Would he not seem ridiculous and grabby? Or worse? And Clitus Tilney! What would he say if his firm was dragged into so humiliating a failure? But no, no, he wouldn’t even think of it. He could burn the will secretly, if necessary; nobody need know unless—well, unless he won. And his heart bounded as he thought of the paneled office that Tilney would have to assign to the director of the Hubert Foundation.

  A new office was only the first of many imaginative flights in which he riotously indulged. He saw himself dispensing grants to universities and hospitals, called on, solicited, profusely thanked. He calculated and recalculated his executor’s commissions on increasingly optimistic estimates of the Colonel’s estate. In fact, his concept of the old man’s wealth and his own control of it, the apotheosis of Rutherford Tower to the position of benefactor of the city, the Tower at long last of Tower, Tilney & Webb, began, in the ensuing months, to edge out the more real prospect of disappointment. The fantasy had become too important not to be deliberately indulged in. When he turned at breakfast to the obituary page, he would close his eyes and actually pray that he would not find the name there, so that he would have another day in which to dream.

  When the Colonel did die, it was Phyllis, of course, who spotted it. “I see that old Colonel Bill is dead,” she said at breakfast one morning, without looking up from her newspaper. “Eighty-seven. Didn’t you say he’d been in to see you?”

  For a moment, Rutherford sat utterly still. “Where did he die?” he asked.

  “In some lawyer’s office in Miami. So convenient, I should imagine. They probably had all his papers ready. Why, Rutherford, where are you going?”

  He didn’t trust himself to wait, and hurried out. In the street, he bought copies of all the newspapers and went to a Central Park bench to read them. There was little more in any of the obituaries than the headlines: “Former Army Officer Stricken” or “Husband of Mrs. J. L. Tyson Succumbs.” He could find nothing else about the Miami lawyer. After all, he reasoned desperately as he got up and walked through the Mall, wasn’t it only natural for the Colonel to have Florida counsel? Didn’t he spend part of the year there? But, for all his arguments, it was almost lunchtime before he gathered courage to call his office. His secretary, however, had to report only that Aunt Mildred Tower had called twice and wanted him to call back.

  “Tell her I’m tied up,” he said irritably. “Tell her I’ve gone to the partners’ lunch.”

  For, indeed, it was Monday, the day of their weekly lunch. When he got to the private room of the Down Town where they met, he found some twenty of them at the table, listening to Clitus Tilney. Rutherford assumed, as he slipped into a chair at the lower end of the table, that the senior partner was telling one of his usual stories to illustrate the greatness of Clitus and the confounding of his rivals. But this story, as he listened to it with a growing void in his stomach, appeared to be something else.

  “No, it’s true, I’m not exaggerating,” Tilney was saying, with a rumbling laugh. “There are twenty-five wills that they know of already, and they’re not all in by a long shot. Sam Kennecott, at Standard Trust, told me it was a mania with the old boy. And the killing thing is, they’re all the same. Except for one that has forty-five pages of specific bequests, they all set up some crazy foundation under the control of—guess who—the little shyster who drew the will! Sam says you’ve never seen such an accumulation of greed in your life! In my opinion, they ought to be disbarred, the lot of them, for taking advantage of the poor old dodo. Except the joke’s on them—that’s the beauty of it!”

  Rutherford did not have to ask one of his neighbors the name of the deceased, but, feeling dazed, he did. The neighbor told him.

  “Did any of the big firms get hooked?” someone asked.

  “Good Lord, we have some ethics, I hope!” Tilney answered. “Though there’s a rumor that one did. Harrison & Lambert, someone said. Wouldn’t it be wonderful?” Tilney’s large jowls positively shook with pleasure. “What wouldn’t I give to see old Cy Lambert caught like a monkey with his fist in the bottle!”

  Rutherford spoke up suddenly. His voice was so high that everyone turned and looked at him. “But what about the man with the last will?” he called down the table to Mr. Tilney. “Why is it a joke on him?”

  “You mean the man in Miami?” Tilney said, flashing at Rutherford the fixed smile of his dislike. “Because the old guy didn’t have that sort of money. Not foundation money. The big stuff was all in trust, of course, and goes to the Tysons, where it should go.”

  Rutherford concentrated on eating a single course. It would look odd, after his interruption, to leave at once. When he had emptied his plate, he wiped his mouth carefully, excused himself to his neighbors, and walked slowly from the room.

  Back at the office, however, he almost dashed to Baitsell’s room. Closing the door behind him, he faced the startled young man with wild eyes. “Look, Baitsell, about that will of Colonel Hubert’s—you remember.” Baitsell nodded quickly. “Well, he died, you see.”

  “Yes, sir. I read about it.”

  “Apparently, he’s written some subsequent wills. I think we’d better do nothing about filing ours for the time being. And if I were you I wouldn’t mention this around the office. It might—”

  “But it’s already filed, sir!”

  “It’s what?”

  “Yes, sir. I filed it.”

  “How could you?” Rutherford’s voice was almost a scream. “You haven’t had time to prepare a petition, let alone get it signed!”

  “Oh, I don’t mean that I filed it for probate, Mr. Tower. I mean I filed it for safekeeping in the Surrogate’s Court. Before he died. The same day he signed it.”

  Rutherford, looking into the young man’s clear, honest eyes, knew now that he faced the unwitting agent of his own devil. “Why did you do that?” he asked in a low, almost curious tone. “We never do that with wills. We keep them in our vault.”

  “Oh, I know that, sir,” Baitsell answered proudly. “But you told me you didn’t know the relatives. I tho
ught if the old gentleman died and you didn’t hear about it at once, they might rush in with another will. Now they’ll find ours sitting up there in the courthouse, staring them right in the face. Yes, sir, Mr. Tower, you’ll have to be given notice of every will that’s offered. Public notice!”

  Rutherford looked at the triumphant young man for a moment and then returned without a word to his own office. There he leaned against Uncle Reginald’s safe and thought in a stunned, stupid way of old Cy Lambert laughing, even shouting, at Clitus Tilney. Then he shook his head. It was too much—too much to take in. He wondered, in a sudden new mood of detachment, if it wasn’t rather distinguished to be hounded so personally by the furies. Orestes. Orestes Rutherford Tower. His telephone rang.

  “Rutherford? Is it you?” a voice asked.

  “Yes, Aunt Mildred,” he said quietly.

  “Well, I’m glad to get you at last. I don’t know what your uncle would have said about the hours young lawyers keep today. And people talk about the pressure of modern life! Talk is all it is. But look, Rutherford. That blackguard of a landlord of mine is acting up again. He now claims that my apartment lease doesn’t include an extra maid’s room in the basement. I want you to come right up and talk to him. This afternoon. You can, can’t you?”

  “Yes, Aunt Mildred,” he said again. “I’m practically on my way.”

  The Single Reader

  NONE of his law partners or clients, or even the friends who considered themselves closest to him, knew the secret of Morris Madison. They saw the tall, thin, smooth, urbane tax expert, at the height of his career in his early fifties, the thick, greying hair parted in the center and rising high above a tall forehead, the long, strong, firm nose and the long oblong face, the melancholy but un-self-betraying eyes. They heard the soft, precise voice, the slow, clear articulation; they marveled at the ease with which he could explain the thorniest tax principle and at the profundity of his general information, from politics to social gossip. Morris, they all agreed, was not only the ideal extra man for the grandest dinner party; he was the perfect companion for the Canadian fishing trip. But they had no idea that he was a dedicated man. They suspected all kinds of lacks in his life, besides the obvious ones of a wife and children, and in the free fashion of a psychiatrically minded era they attributed his reserve and good manners to every kind of frustration and insecurity. But none of them suspected that he had a passion.

  He kept a diary. He had started it twenty-five years before, when his wife had left him, a horsy country girl who had never relaxed her attitude that the city was full of “snobs and toadies” of whom her husband was one of the worst. Madison had resented her for a year; then in his mind he had forgiven her; ultimately he had even admitted that he might have mishandled her. He had taken her too seriously, too literally, too reasonably. She had wanted domination rather than understanding. The only person who cared about understanding was himself. And for himself he started a diary.

  How he could have lived without it in the years that followed, he would not have known. As a rising young lawyer and a single man he was at everybody’s mercy. The wives of the older partners expected him to fill in at their dinner parties and listen respectfully to widows and matrons who talked about their servants and children. Clients with personal problems, knowing that he had no family, felt entitled to help themselves to his nights as well as his days for greater self-revelation. Married friends in domestic trouble poured out their woes to him, ostensibly to profit from his experience, but actually for the heady delights of indiscreet confession. Single women regarded him as fair game for every imaginable confidence, and even happy husbands in summertime, when their wives were at the seashore, sought out the congenial company of “old Morris” to relate to him, in alcoholic profusion at the bars of their clubs, the business worries that no sensible spouse would dream of listening to. It began to seem to Madison, in the words of Emily Dickinson, that “all the heavens were a bell and being but an ear” and that the only way for him to talk was to talk to himself.

  At first the diary was, naturally enough, primarily the vehicle for his resentment. His circle of acquaintance appeared in it in all the banality of their unsolicited communication, with huge heads and eyes and bigger mouths; their talk was lampooned rather than reported. But on a reading at the end of its first year Madison had been struck by the fact that the most illuminating passages were those where he had dryly set down scenes and conversations that had not seemed of particular interest at the time. For example, a lunch with Clitus Tilney in which the latter had discussed his own prospects of partnership in the firm contained in a dozen lines the very portrait of downtown ambition. Madison now became more selective in his entries. His ears were alerted for the right confidence, the right complaint, even the right phrase that would convey the essential quality of the speaker. And as his people began to breathe and chatter like themselves in his pages, he realized the first great joy of recreation.

  He began to raise his sights. He decided that he wanted to paint a picture of life in New York for a subsequent generation. He began to note the razing of buildings and the erection of new ones. He watched ticker tape parades and dined in the newest restaurants. He marked fashions and fads and even attended fires. He read exhaustively in the great diarists of the past, Pepys, Evelyn, Saint-Simon, and paid many visits to the New York Historical Society to pore over the unpublished pages of Mayor Hone. His conservative friends were surprised to find themselves deserted for Elsa Maxwell’s frolicsome balls, as was café society in turn to find itself abandoned for the dullest bar association dinners. Madison would leave a reception at the Archdiocese to go to a late party at Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt’s and slip away from there to a gathering at Sardi’s. He was widely regarded as a snob, but it was rare for two people to agree on what kind.

  Inevitably, he came to think of his people as they would one day appear in his diary. If a judge was rude to him while he was arguing a case, if a government official was quixotic or arbitrary, Madison would reflect with an inner smile that they were marring their portraits for posterity. Yet he took great pains to avoid the prejudices which he suspected even in his idol, Saint-Simon. Most of the people whom he knew, like many of Saint-Simon’s, would survive to posterity only in his own unre-buttable pages. If he succumbed to the temptation of “touching them up,” of making them wittier or nastier or bigger or smaller than they were, nobody in a hundred years would be any the wiser. But his work would have become fiction, and he had no intention of being a mere novelist.

  When he was fifty-three, the great set of red morocco on the shelves of his cedar closet totaled more volumes than the years of his age, for there were sometimes three or four to a single year. The diary was now insatiable. It not only demanded its daily addition; it demanded footnotes, appendices, even illustrations. Madison found that he spent as much time editing it as he did writing it, but the former task had the advantage of requiring a constant rereading of his work, a constant reabsorbing of his own glowing, crowded, changing picture of the city, now a Bruegel, now a Hogarth, now a quiet, still Vermeer. Was it not as near as he might ever come to the joys of having an audience? Friends were surprised to find him asking for snapshots of themselves or of their deceased relatives or even of long destroyed houses. They decided that he was becoming sentimental with age. His dinner partners were sometimes piqued to find the “perfect listener” interrupting their confidences with such questions as: “Do you happen to remember what year your father sold the house in Seventieth Street?” or “Is it true that your Aunt Gisèle refused to swim in a pool if there were men in it?”

  But only Clitus Tilney seemed to suspect the existence of an avocation. At lunch one day at the Down Town Association, Tilney rubbed his cheeks, his elbows on the table, for several long silent moments, reminding Madison of a great sleek lazy bear, bored in a zoo.

  “Morris, do you know something?” he began, folding his hands on the table and contemplating them with an air of mi
ld surprise. “I worry about you. Oh, I know, downtown we never talk personally. We live and work, cheek by jowl, year after year, and never know a thing about each other. And never seem to want to, either. But once in a while I have to break that rule. With people I like, anyway. And I like you, Morris. But if you don’t want to hear me, just tell me to shut my big mouth.”

  “No, please, Clitus. I’d love to hear you.”

  “That’s what you always say: ‘I’d love to hear you.’” Tilney shook his large head as if Madison’s response were the very symptom that most troubled him. “But anyway. I’ve never had a doubt that, after my own, yours was the best legal head in the office.” He smiled to show that his boast was humorous. “Yet you and I both know that we can go just so far in life as lawyers. We don’t kid ourselves. I’m a securities expert, and you’re a tax wizard. We’ve mastered our respective fields of gimmickry. But that’s not enough for us. Rutherford Tower can be perfectly happy with his wills and trusts, and Waldron Webb with his lawsuits. But you and I … well, our souls need more.”

  “What does your soul need, Clitus?”

  “There you go again, throwing the ball right back at me. Will you hang on to it a moment, for pity’s sake? I want to talk about you.”

  Madison stirred uneasily. “But I could answer better if you told me first.”

  “Oh, very well,” Tilney answered with an impatient shrug. “Only you know it, anyway. I’ve got the Washington bug. Ever since I had that job with Bob Lovett. And sometimes I even think I’d like to go back to Ulrica and teach.”

  “The firm will never let you go.”

  “Ah, well,” said Tilney with a sigh, “that’s another matter, isn’t it? But to get back to you. You see? I can be very persistent. I’ve noticed in the past year that you’ve delegated more work.”