Powers of Attorney

by Louis Auchincloss

  Lois’ cabin contained two small bedrooms over the living room. The plan had been that she and Doris would occupy these while the men slept on a sofa and daybed below. “I don’t give a damn where Barnes sleeps,” Harry retorted. “Except I’m glad it won’t be with me. He looks like a snorer.”

  “You’re not hopelessly disgusted at our sordid little ménage?”

  “Be your age, Doris!”

  They finished their drinks and rose to walk back over the now deserted beach to the cabin which was dark. Doris stumbled in the sand, and he put an arm around her waist, and as she leaned heavily against him, he knew that he was not going to resist any further. He had had many drinks, but he was not drunk, and he saw clearly that what he was going to do he might regret, but he doubted that he would regret it very much. And, anyway, what the hell? There was a touch of fall wind in the air which reminded him that he had been chaste since June.

  “Oh, Harry, please come up with me,” she whispered as they reached the outside stairway. She clung to him in sudden desperation. “Please, please! I’ll be so lonely if you don’t, I can’t stand it.”

  “I’m coming, don’t worry,” he said and chuckled. “Go on up, scat!” And he turned her around and gave her a slap on the buttocks to send her stumbling up the stairs.

  It was not so much that night that was the mistake as the following night. Doris and Lois spent all Sunday on the beach, in a hazy mood between the pleasures of remembered satisfaction and the misery of their hangovers, while Mr. Barnes slept and Harry took another of his hikes. When he returned, late again, the others were drinking cocktails, and again he drank too many, and again he slept with Doris. But this time she was soberer and more demanding, and when he rose at five, for he had to drive to a real estate closing in Jamaica, leaving the girls to come in by train, and contemplated the gently snoring figure with the messy greying hair on the bed, he knew that he was never going to share a room with Doris Marsh again.

  He did not get to the office until noon, but he had not been at his desk ten minutes reading his mail when he looked up to see her in the doorway, gazing at him with limpid eyes.

  “Good morning, Harry,” she said softly and then continued her way down the corridor. That she did not even wait for him to return her greeting was all the proof he needed that she regarded him now as her own. Harry sighed and prepared himself for the job that had to be done.

  Nor did he have much time. In ten minutes Doris was back in his doorway to ask: “How about lunch?”

  “Sorry, Doris, I’ve got to write up a closing memo. I may just have a sandwich sent in.”

  “Why don’t you order two, then? I’ll come in and eat it with you.”

  “I said I was working.”

  “My, my, aren’t we busy all of a sudden? Are you trying to avoid me?”

  Her tone was light and teasing; it was obvious that she did take his truculence seriously. Harry rose. “Step in, Doris, will you, please?” he asked abruptly and closed the door behind her. “Now let’s get one thing straight,” he continued, looking directly into her startled eyes, “and then everything will be easier. What happened this weekend was great fun, but it was just a weekend and just fun. Is that clear?”

  “You mean you’re not coming next weekend? Lois told me to ask you.”

  He noted how quickly she tried to shift the discussion from the general to the particular. “I’m sorry. I don’t believe in repeating these things.”

  “It’s a question of kiss and run?” She laughed with sudden harshness.

  “I’m not running, Doris.”

  She gasped. “Do you think, Harry Reilley, that I’m the kind of girl who behaves that way every weekend?”

  “Not every weekend, no.”

  “Oh!”

  “Well, you don’t expect me to believe I was the first, do you?”

  The tears jumped into her eyes as she exclaimed: “What a brute you are! I should have known better than to have had anything to do with you!”

  Harry was uncomfortable when she had gone, but he knew that it was better and kinder to put things in their proper setting at the earliest possible moment. Whatever Doris should say about him in the future, she would not be able to bracket him with Phil.

  It had required a certain flexing of the muscles to stand up to Doris, but no similar exertion was required with Lois Grimshawe when she came to his office that afternoon.

  “May I see you a minute, Mr. Reilley?” she asked from the doorway in her high, sweet, synthetic tone.

  “Why, certainly, Mrs. Grimshawe.”

  She sat in the chair before his desk and darted her head forward so that her chin was over the edge of his blotter. “What’s wrong, Harry? Doris says you won’t come down next weekend. I thought we all had such a good time. Didn’t you enjoy it?”

  “I enjoyed it very much.”

  “Doris Marsh is one of the kindest, sweetest creatures that ever drew breath!”

  “Exactly a reason for giving her fair warning. Before she begins to get proprietary ideas.”

  “You might have thought of that before.”

  “I don’t see why. A good time was had by all. Can’t we leave it at that?”

  “But I’m not just thinking of Doris. I’m thinking of you, Harry. Isn’t it time you settled down? And where in the world would you find a better wife than Doris?”

  “Wife!” Harry laughed, but his laugh was not pleasant. “I hardly think your role last weekend, Lois, was one that justifies your playing the outraged father with the shotgun!”

  Lois’ comprehension was slow, as manifested by the gradual deepening of her color behind a disconcerted stare. “I think that’s a very nasty way for you to talk.”

  “I think you’ve brought up a very dangerous topic.”

  “Then you have no morals?”

  “I have those of Devon.”

  At this Lois Grimshawe took her dignified departure, and Harry’s popularity with the staff was over once and for all. What vicious tales she spread about him he was never to know, but Miss Gibbon only grunted now when he went to the file room and Mrs. Lane in the library gave him cursory nods in exchange for his cheerful greetings. And, needless to add, the stenographers sent to him from Lois’ “pool” were the greenest she could find. Doris never spoke to him now and seemed to want others to observe her coolness. When they passed in the corridor, she averted her face in an unmistakable cut.

  Harry’s effort to convince himself that he did not care was not altogether successful. He had formed so few friendships in the firm that the loss of his easy bantering relationship with the girls on the staff made the office a cold place. Had he loved his work, it might have made the difference, or had he had any reasonable hope of a transfer to a more interesting department. He decided that if he was going to stay, he would have to re-examine his position, and to do this he determined upon an interview with the senior partner.

  As he turned the corner of the corridor on his way to Clitus Tilney’s office, he almost collided with the large, broad-shouldered, tweeded figure coming out.

  “Hello, Harry.” Tilney made a point of addressing each associate by his first name. He was about to walk on when he stopped suddenly. “Oh, Harry.”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “Mrs. Tilney and I have never had the pleasure of seeing you in our home. I wonder if you’d care to take family supper with us next Sunday. Quite informally. At seven o’clock?”

  “Why, I should like to very much. Thank you, sir.”

  “Good. We’ll expect you, then.”

  Harry had heard of the Tilney suppers and had always assumed that only “disciples” were asked. Now, as he gazed in surprise after that retreating figure he grunted in self-derision at his own fatuousness for remembering what Doris had said about his future in the firm.

  He would never have believed that home life in New York could be as attractive as he found it that night at the Tilneys’. The house had a dark, cool leathery, masculine comfortable
ness. One felt that Mrs. Tilney had done it all, but had done it with her husband in mind. It was an ordinary brownstone in size, but the ceilings were higher than average, and the walls were covered with landscape paintings of the Hudson River school and photographs of bar groups and judges. The chairs were low and deep and hard to get out of, and the big low mosaic tables invulnerable to spilt drinks. Clitus Tilney himself turned out to be an excellent host. He moved cheerfully about the room with a big silver cocktail shaker from which he poured very cold dry martinis into chilled silver mugs. He was evidently not a man who confined his perfectionism to the law. Mrs. Tilney was attractive, in a large, serene way, but she let her husband take the lead, which Harry liked.

  There were a dozen people in the room, mostly associates and their wives. Harry looked suspiciously about to see with whom Tilney had classed him, half expecting to find Doris Marsh and Lee Ozite. Would it be a pickup party for all the oddities in the office hitherto neglected by the great man? But he had immediately to admit that his suspicion was unfair. All the other men were “disciples,” and as he was putting this together, Bart French, who had married the oldest Tilney girl, came up to him.

  “Good to see you, Harry. You’ll find my father-in-law makes a very dry martini.”

  “Is that a warning or a compliment?”

  “Both, I guess.”

  Harry was not sure that he liked being made to feel at home by French, and he looked stiffly at that long oval brown face with the tired eyes that Doris Marsh had once described as charming. French was what Harry called a “boy scout.” He was always pretending that, like the other clerks, he had to live on his salary.

  “Quite a place your old man’s got here.”

  “Isn’t it?” French responded eagerly. “What I think of as a Teal lawyer’s house. I hope some day I’ll be able to afford one like it.”

  “Can’t you now?”

  “On what they pay us clerks at 65 Wall? Fat chance!”

  “But I thought you had a large private income.”

  “I don’t know what you call large,” French muttered, and moved away, obviously put out by such bad form.

  Harry was delighted to have ruffled him so easily. Besides, there was someone far better to contemplate, as he finished his drink, than Bart French, and that was the youngest Tilney daughter, who had just entered the room. He learned that her name was Fran from the nice old grey woman passing cheese and that she taught English at Miss Irvin’s School. She was thin and pale, with soft long auburn hair and small brown eyes that had an odd shine, almost a glitter. Her face was the least bit long and her features very delicate, her nose turned up and her skin, Harry observed as he moved closer, almost translucent. Despite the slightness of her frame and the quick nervous gesticulations of her arms, she conveyed, in the rapid, soft tone that he could just hear across the room, the sense of a brittle, bright intelligence. Taking his refilled drink to a corner by a globe of the world that he could pretend to be turning, he resumed his contemplation of Miss Tilney. Suddenly she turned, as if aware of his gaze, and walked over to him.

  “You must be Harry Reilley. I’m Fran Tilney. We’re going in to supper now, and you’re next to me. Can you bear it?”

  Harry would not have thought, as he followed her down the narrow stairway to the dining room, that anything could have spoiled that evening, and yet her very first question at the table did so.

  “What do you do in the office? Are you in ‘green goods,’ too?”

  This was a term used downtown, always with a perfunctory snicker, to describe the department which dealt with corporate securities. Every other lawyer at the party was in “green goods.”

  “No, I’m an untouchable,” he said gruffly. “I’m in real estate.”

  “But that must be interesting, too. Or at least basic.”

  “As interesting as anything else, I guess.”

  “That doesn’t sound as if you had a very high opinion of the law.”

  He shrugged. “It’s a living. If it was too much fun, people wouldn’t pay you to do it.”

  Miss Tilney looked at him more closely. She was a very serious girl. “But Daddy loves his work.”

  “I daresay. But he’s on top of the heap.”

  “It’s not a question of his being on top, Mr. Reilley. It’s a question of his caring about his profession.”

  “I beg your pardon, Miss Tilney. It’s a question of his having hired help to take care of the boring details.”

  “I never heard anything so cynical,” she exclaimed, obviously shocked. “In a learned profession none of the details should be boring.”

  “But they are. Writing up all that small print so the client can get out of a bad bargain.” Harry paused, marveling that the urge to be unpleasant at the expense of his superiors could be stronger than the urge to make friends with a beautiful girl. “Your father’s a very clever man, you know. He knows he has to idealize the law for the benefit of all those young men who followed him around like faithful hounds. If he didn’t make them feel like Jesuit missionaries, they wouldn’t be happy, and if they weren’t happy, they wouldn’t work so well.”

  It was clear that no such heresy had been talked in the Tilney house before. “You mean Daddy says things he doesn’t mean?”

  “Let’s put it that he counts on different interpretations at different levels.”

  “Of which mine must be the lowest!”

  He saw that he was making her really angry and bitterly regretted his course. But it seemed like a one-way street; he had to go to the end to turn around. “You’re not a lawyer,” he tried to explain. “But your dad certainly knows that the greater part of securities work is jamming as many ads into a prospectus as one can slip under the nose of the Securities Exchange Commission.”

  “I think you’ll find the facts to be otherwise if you take the trouble to look into them,” she said in a chilling tone. “My father cares passionately that only the exact truth be stated in his prospectuses.”

  “What is truth? Pilate asked.”

  “I really can’t understand, if you feel that way, why you work for Tower, Tilney at all.”

  “I told you, it’s a living.”

  “Surely there must be an easier one.”

  “Let me know if you hear of it.”

  She turned away abruptly to the man on her other side, and Harry was graced with her back for the rest of the meal. After dinner, too, she avoided him, and it was only when he was leaving and had the excuse to bid her goodnight that there was an opportunity for further interchange.

  “I guess you only talk to green goods. The poor ‘basic’ real estate man has hardly had a word with you all evening.”

  “It’s not that at all, Mr. Reilley. I haven’t talked to you because it seemed to me you had such a poor opinion of us all.”

  “Of you all? Not of you, surely.”

  “Oh, I don’t pretend to set myself apart.”

  Something tore now in his heart at the stupidity of it. Particularly when he sensed, in the very tensity of her anger, that she, too, was aware of something in the atmosphere between them. “Look, Miss Tilney. No, let me call you Fran. I’ve been an awful ass tonight, saying a lot of things I didn’t mean at all. Playing the cheap cynic. The only thing I really wanted to tell you was what a beautiful, bright girl I think you are. Give me another chance, will you? Let me take you out to dinner some night. Any night you say. I’d like to show you I’m not a complete hick.” They were standing alone, by the door to the living room, and she was staring at him with intent, startled eyes. “How about it? Tuesday night?” She still said nothing. “Are you too mad at me? Or are you engaged to be married, or something like that?”

  “No, nothing like that,” she said at last and laughed flatly. “I’ll be glad to go out with you on Tuesday, Mr. Reilley. Harry, I mean.”

  He had to walk home that night to work off his excitement. What he marveled at most, as he looked back over the evening, was the miracle of his own a
pology at the last moment. If she had gone to bed early, if she had slipped out of the house for a later engagement, or if she had even been standing with her father when he came up to bid her goodnight, all would have been lost. She would have gone out of his life forever. It would have been simply another closed chapter in the long wasteful history of his truculence. Never before could he remember having experienced so sudden an attraction. He had not even dared to shake her hand in leaving. And she had been glad he hadn’t, too. Oh, yes. She had felt some of the same pull. It was a pity that she should be quite so identified with her father’s firm, but that was something he could not help. The whole evening, for that matter, was showing signs of developing into something that he could not help. And where, after all, had helping things got him?

  She was waiting in the front hall when he called on Tuesday night. Not for her was the pose at the piano, the startled look at the clock, the “Good heavens, is it seven already?” She tucked her arm under his as they went down the steep stoop and suggested an Italian restaurant on Third Avenue.

  “I see you have my pocketbook in mind,” he said as they got into a taxi.

  “Well, I hate to see a lot of money spent on ravioli. And ravioli is what I’ve been looking forward to all day.”

  Harry reflected that to some men her abruptness in taking the lead might have been slightly offensive. But he felt no need to assert himself in the matter of the choice of restaurants. As he watched her, he saw her shoulders twitch, in a sudden involuntary spasm. Was she afraid of what she was doing, afraid of going out with him? Because he wasn’t the right type of young man? He wondered if she had told her father.

  At the restaurant he ordered a cocktail and she a glass of Dubonnet. She ordered it with the promptness of a habitual nondrinker who knows that a man likes her to have something in her hand. He guessed that she would not finish it, which turned out to be correct. He guessed later that she would drink one glass of red wine with her ravioli, and this, too, turned out to be right.

  “I behaved very badly at your family’s the other night,” he apologized again. “When I’m faced with people whom I basically admire, or even envy, like your father, I have a tendency to revert to the nasty little boy I once was. I try to tear them down. My father went to jail when I was fourteen, and I suppose a psychiatrist would say that I can’t admit that anyone else’s could be any better.”