Powers of Attorney

by Louis Auchincloss

  “How fantastical you are. Really, Aurelia, I wouldn’t have thought it of you. You’ve seen for yourself that the entries stop with our friendship. If anyone’s won, it’s you.”

  “But I tell you I’m out of ammunition!” she exclaimed shrilly. “I have to take my heels while I can. For don’t think Goliath wouldn’t get his revenge for all those missing entries. I should be made his slave, like you. I should be harnessed and put to work. After all, he has missed the woman’s touch, hasn’t he? The woman’s point of view? Isn’t that the one thing he needs. Didn’t Pepys have a wife? Wasn’t there a Mrs. Saint-Simon?”

  “There was a duchess,” Madison said dryly.

  “Exactly. And your diary wants a Mrs. Madison. But it won’t be me. And if you’re wise, Morris, it won’t be anyone. You and your diary can be happy together. But, I beg of you, don’t listen to it when it points its long, inky finger at another human being!”

  Madison was beginning to wonder if she was sober. “You must think me demented.”

  “Well, I don’t suppose you’d burn down New York to make a page for your diary.” She laughed a bit wildly. “After all, you might burn the diary with it. But, no, you have copies in a vault, don’t you?” Here she seemed at last to remember herself, and she placed a rueful hand on his. “Forgive me, my dear, for being so overwrought. Let me slip away now and get a good night’s sleep. I’ll take a pill. And next week we’ll talk on the telephone and see if we can’t put things back on the nice old friendly basis.”

  “Aurelia—”

  But she was gone. She was hurrying across the room, between the tables, and he had actually to run to catch up with her, clutching his three volumes.

  “Aurelia!” he cried in a tone that made her turn and stare. “Wait!”

  “What is it, Morris? What more is there to say?”

  “You haven’t told me what you think of the diary.”

  She seemed not to comprehend. “I haven’t?”

  “I mean what you think of it as a diary.”

  “Oh.” She treated this almost as an irrelevance. “But it’s magnificent, of course. You know that.”

  “It’s just what I don’t know! It’s just what I’ve spent the past several months trying to find out!”

  “Oh, my dear,” she murmured, shaking her head sadly, “you have nothing to worry about there. It’s luminous. It’s pulsating. It’s unbelievable, really. I doubt if there’s ever been anything like it. Poor old Saint-Simon, his nose will be out of joint. Oh, yes, Morris. Your diary is peerless.”

  She turned again to go out the door, and he let her go. For a moment he stood there, dazed, stock-still by the checkroom, until the headwaiter asked him if he wished to dine alone. He shook his head quickly and went out to the street to hail a taxi. It was only seven-thirty; he had still time to dine at the Century Club. When he got there, he hurried to the third floor and glanced, as he always did, through the oval window to see who was sitting at the members’ table. There was an empty seat between Raymond Massey and Ed Murrow. Opposite he noted the great square noble face and shaggy head of Learned Hand. He must have just finished one of his famous anecdotes, for Madison heard the sputter of laughter around his end of the table. It would be a good night. As he glided forward to take that empty seat he knew that he was a perfectly happy man again.

  The Revenges of Mrs. Abercrombie

  MRS. ABERCROMBIE would have been with Tower Tilney & Webb, come December, a grand total of forty years and was scheduled to be retired in the spring on her sixty-fifth birthday, when she and Mr. Abercrombie, an already pensioned accountant, planned to move to a new ranch house at a prudent distance from the beach in Montauk. Mr. Abercrombie, who found his rambles in Prospect Park, even with the zoo, inadequate to fill the long Brooklyn mornings and afternoons, looked forward to the change, but his wife was less enthusiastic. Where would she find, along the windy dunes of Long Island, the special consideration, the almost awesome isolation, which she enjoyed as secretary of the Tower Estates and treasurer of the Tower Foundation, known to all the office staff as the amanuensis of the late senior partner and surrogate, Reginald Tower?

  Mrs. Abercrombie liked to think that she looked the part that she liked to play, and to some extent she did. Her slow, rolling gait gave to her broad figure, as it progressed down the corridors, and to her square chin, her high, broad brow, her crowning pompadour of silky grey, some of the dignity of a capital ship proceeding into harbor on a choppy sea but nonetheless ready, with sailors in white manning the rail, to render honors to the local commander. Her small office contained only a desk, two chairs and a large, mahogany framed photograph of Surrogate Tower in his robes, but she had it all to herself, and on the opaque glass door appeared, in gold lettering, the words “Tower Estates,” followed by “Mrs. Abercrombie, Secretary.” The next office was occupied by Rutherford Tower, whose nervous manner and furtive eyes seemed constantly to apologize for any presumption in sharing the last name of his deceased uncle. Mrs. Abercrombie could see only a parody of the Surrogate in his long, sallow features, and she particularly minded his habit of setting his teeth, because he did so only when he was frightened and not, like his uncle, when he was crossed. His teeth were set with a particular rigidity one morning, a month before Christmas, when he called her in to discuss tax returns.

  “Mr. Tilney’s on one of his efficiency rampages,” he began gloomily. “He seems to think all the income tax returns should be prepared by the tax department.”

  “Surely not mine?”

  By “mine” Mrs. Abercrombie meant those of Rutherford Tower’s uncle’s family. Indeed, the preparation of these, plus the processing of law students’ applications for Tower Foundation grants, constituted her principal activities in the firm.

  “Even yours, I’m afraid.” He looked up at her with the abrupt, sullen defiance of the timid. “Even Aunt Mildred’s.”

  “I don’t think Mrs. Tower would want anyone else prying into her personal affairs. I have always done her returns.”

  “Well, it seems she was at dinner at the Tilneys’ the other night and agreed to the whole thing. Tilney told her you couldn’t be expected to keep up to date on every last tax wrinkle.”

  His words were a bleak reminder of the desolating disloyalty of people like Mrs. Tower. It was all very well to warm oneself in the sunshine of their benignant smiles on those rare visits downtown to sign a will, to cut a coupon, to make a tax-free gift, or to be lulled by their smooth, firm, complimentary voices on the telephone—“Dear Mrs. A, would it be a terrible imposition to ask you to address my Christmas cards this year?”—but one always knew, in a drafty little corner of one’s heart, that one did not really exist for them, that at dinner tables covered with thin-stemmed wineglasses and silver candelabra they would betray one to the Tilneys of this world, for a snicker, let alone a laugh.

  “I think, if you don’t mind my saying so, Mr. Tower, that you make a mistake to let Mr. Tilney take over the running of your department. Of course, I understand that as senior partner he has a general responsibility for the firm. But surely that doesn’t include all the details. Surely, it behooves you to stand up for your own!”

  “I do my best, Mrs. A,” he replied with an ashy little smile. “But Tilney’s always shouting about people not pulling their weight.”

  “The Surrogate used to say,” Mrs. Abercrombie retorted in the high, cheerful, rippling tone, like the crest of a fast moving breaker, that she used in invoking her late employer’s title, “that one couldn’t evaluate an estate practice over one year, or even two or three. But he maintained that if one took a sufficiently long view, one would find it was estates that paid the rent!”

  “Well, until you can convince Mr. Tilney of that, I am afraid we must do as he says.”

  Mrs. Abercrombie stood motionless for a heavy moment; then, without a word, she slowly turned to depart. But she did not fool herself. The dignity of her exit hardly covered her sweeping defeat in the matter of the
tax returns. For years now, in fact, even since before the beloved Surrogate’s death, she had viewed with an increasingly critical eye what Clitus Tilney was doing to the firm. As a young woman she had come into an office that still had some of the aroma of the days of the great individualist lawyers, those driving, nervous men who had cleaned out of the practice of law the windy court oratory of a Websterian age and substituted the machinelike chatter of corporate meetings, dry, snappish authoritarian men who, for all that, had had distinction as well as arrogance, manners as well as testiness, who had believed in being gentlemen as well as lawyers, who had collected paintings, built great houses, loved old wines. They might have driven their staffs unmercifully, but their offices had had charm: safes that did not open, or to which everyone had the combination, receptionists who were burly, storytelling, retired cops who shouted at clients, and tea served to everybody at five in big, dark comfortable libraries. There were no silvery bells to summon people to the telephone, no honey-toned switchboard operators, no “office organization” pamphlets, no memoranda from headquarters on little points of procedure, no office parties or “outings” to improve morale. And now? Well, now they might as well move to Madison Avenue and have done with it!

  Mrs. Abercrombie lunched that day with Mrs. Grimshawe, head of stenographic. Her relations with the staff were governed by three simple rules. To the new girls and office boys she merely nodded, if she happened to pass them in the corridor. With those who had been employed five years or more she occasionally chatted, seated in her corner armchair in the recreation room. With a few intimates, of high position and long tenure of employment, she lunched and permitted the use of Christian names. Of the latter group Lois Grimshawe was certainly closest to her, yet Mrs. Abercrombie had always ruefully to acknowledge that Lois, for all her sympathy and sharing of complaints, had manifested a distinct tendency to compromise with the Tilney administration. She had dyed her hair and divorced her husband, and Mrs. Abercrombie even suspected that the morning headaches of which she complained were not always the result of her vaunted insomnia.

  At lunch Mrs. Grimshawe always had a martini, while her friend had a small dry sherry, but that day she suggested a second round.

  “I’m sorry, Annabel,” she said a bit snappishly, in answer to Mrs. Abercrombie’s stare. “I’m feeling nervous today. I can’t seem to concentrate on anything I’m doing.”

  “I wonder if a second cocktail will help that.”

  “It calms me down. It’s all very well for you to be superior with a quiet room to yourself and the same things to do every day. I’d like to see you in that stenographic pool coping with twenty-five giddy girls who can think of nothing but lipstick and dates!”

  Mrs. Abercrombie knew perfectly well that Lois Grimshawe was proud of her high position in the new scheme of things. She was like a collaborating member of a dispossessed nobility who sneers at the People’s Army while secretly exulting in his commission. Mrs. Abercrombie knew how to deal with such pride.

  “I know how difficult it must be for you, Lois,” she said in a soothing tone. “Believe me, you have all my sympathy. You’re the one who gets the real worm’s-eye view of the Tilney system. The clients may be impressed by the smooth efficiency of the outer office, but it’s you who see the chaos behind it all.”

  “I’ll have you know, Annabel, there’s no chaos in my department!”

  “Of course, I don’t mean it’s your fault, my dear.”

  “If there were chaos, it would be my fault.”

  “We all do our best, I’m sure,” Mrs. Abercrombie said enigmatically as she raised her near-empty glass of sherry to her lips. In the silence that followed her final sip Mrs. Grimshawe gathered the courage to jettison the rattling piece of news for which she had wanted the binding chords of a second martini.

  “I’m afraid Miss Bruney is going to be added to that chaos.”

  Mrs. Abercrombie stared. “Miss Bruney?” she demanded. “My secretary?”

  Of course she knew perfectly well and knew that Mrs. Grimshawe knew, that Miss Bruney was Rutherford Tower’s secretary, but by dint of long encroachment, now amounting to a kind of eminent domain and having started from a simple plea for “a couple of letters a day,” she had succeeded in pre-empting a good half of Miss Bruney’s time.

  “She’s being transferred to the stenographic pool. I had a memo this morning from the boss himself.”

  “But I trained Miss Bruney!”

  “Tell that to Tilney.”

  “What perversity makes that man interfere with things that don’t concern him? This is the second time today!”

  “Not a sparrow falls but he notices,” Mrs. Grimshawe said somberly.

  “Well, here’s one sparrow that may be going to tumble right out of his nest!”

  “You don’t mean you’d resign?”

  “I mean,” Mrs. Abercrombie said grandly, “that there must be some limit to the quantity of humble pie that even an old and faithful servant can be obliged to consume.”

  “Annabel!” exclaimed Mrs. Grimshawe, her resentment dwindling now before her genuine concern. “Remember your pension. All you have to do is wait for the spring. Don’t rock the boat now, dearie. Nothing’s worth that!”

  “If God Tilney chooses to cut off my pension, after forty years of faithful service, then God Tilney will do so.”

  “Let’s not go to extremes.” Mrs. Grimshawe’s tone was sharp and practical. “You know what I’d do if I were you? I’d go to Mr. Tilney myself and tell him my problem. Everyone knows that he kicks Mr. Tower around. But you’re something else again. I wonder if Tilney would make quite so many changes if he had to deal directly with you. Let me call Marjorie Clinger this afternoon and make an appointment.”

  Mrs. Abercrombie was at once struck with the idea and relieved not to have to make the first overture to the senior partner’s secretary. For Miss Clinger was the very symbol of the Tilney era; she had a reputation for miraculous efficiency and seemed to live for her work. She was one of those large, pretty, modern old maids who seem to freeze at forty into a perpetual pantomime of eye rolling and good-natured, half rueful jokes about their own virgin status. She treated everyone, from Mr. Tilney down, with the same slangy familiarity, and was even supposed to be invited to cocktail parties in the homes of partners. Mrs. Abercrombie found this all very unfitting. It was true that she herself had been invited to the Surrogate’s at “Number Nine,” as the house on Seventieth Street had been called, but only on New Year’s Day for a glass of hot mulled wine.

  “Lois tells me you want to see the boss,” Miss Clinger told her on the telephone later that afternoon. It was like Miss Clinger to start right off that way, without even announcing herself, as soon as Mrs. Abercrombie had picked up the instrument. “It must be mental telepathy because he wants to see you. Why don’t you come up in half an hour, and I’ll see if I can squeeze you in between appointments?”

  “Perhaps you will be good enough to ring me when he’s ready. I can come right up.”

  “No, no, that never works. The only way to catch Tilney is to crouch outside his door and pounce when you see the chance!”

  Offensive though she found such a procedure, Mrs. Abercrombie had to submit, and an hour later she found herself literally propelled, by the push of Miss Clinger’s palm between her shoulderblades, into the smiling, smoking presence of the big, long-nosed, high-browed senior partner who was calling out to her in his loud, amiably mocking tone: “Well, well, Mrs. Abercrombie, it’s good to see you! How is everything going in the great world of philanthropy?”

  “Satisfactorily, I trust, sir. We’re very busy.” She noted that she had not been asked to sit.

  “Philanthropy is the greatest thing in the world,” Mr. Tilney continued airily, “but unhappily we can’t all be foundations. At least law firms can’t. We’re in the grubby business of trying to make an honest buck. And the cost of overhead, Mrs. Abercrombie, is something that no lawyer can any longer afford to ig
nore. Gone, gone are the dear old days when you could fill up your stenographic department with trained girls at twenty dollars a week. We must take what we can get and grab what we can grab. Which is why I’ve had to grab Miss Bruney. I hope you’ll understand.”

  “I suppose I can train another girl. It will take time, but I suppose I can do it.”

  “But that’s just it, my dear Mrs. A, why take the trouble? I’m told that the volume of Mr. Tower’s work doesn’t warrant a full-time secretary. We thought that you might pitch in and lend us a hand. How about it? Could you take care of him?”

  “Me, sir? You mean that I should take … that I should take Mr. Tower’s dictation?”

  “Does that astound you?”

  “Well, I haven’t done that kind of work … for years.”

  “But Mr. Tower, the real Mr. Tower, used to tell us you had the fastest shorthand in the office. Surely, you haven’t lost it all?”

  “Perhaps not all,” Mrs. Abercrombie said hesitantly.

  “Oh, I’m sure not,” the senior partner went on confidently. “It wasn’t all that long ago. And how in awe we all used to be of you, Mrs. A! Do you remember that day I came in looking for a job, with hayseeds in my hair, and you tipped me off on how to handle the old man? I’ll never forget it!”

  Mrs. Abercrombie was touched. “I remember it very well. The Surrogate always said that you were a go-getter. He was very proud that he was the one who’d ‘spotted’ you.”

  “And he spotted you, too, didn’t he?”

  “I guess he did, at that.”

  “Of course he did. So two old Tower ‘spottees’ should help each other out, don’t you think? After all, it’s only until spring, and then you’ll be free of the lot of us. Take care of Mr. Tower till then, won’t you?” Mr. Tilney glanced at a printed proof on his desk and then reached over to pull it nearer, presumably to resume the day’s work. “Oh, and Mrs. A,” he added, looking back at her as if it was she and not he who was concluding the interview, “I hope you’re planning to attend the office Christmas party this year. We’re all very much aware that it’s your fortieth anniversary—fortieth, it’s hard to believe isn’t it?—you look no older than the day I first walked in here—and we’ve planned a little presentation.”