The outward expression, however, was not the sign of any inward truth. Behind the rumbling laugh, the oft cleared throat, the anecdote of the glorious past, lay the old dread, intensified, close to panic, relieved only by periods of damp, dull resignation. The mistake would happen soon enough; the law of chances alone decreed it. A good third of the instruments that he now meekly initialed contained clauses that he no longer even pretended to himself that he understood. When he asked a draftsman to explain, he would concentrate so hard on his own expression of intelligent listening that he would forget to listen, and when he asked questions, he was apt to be silenced by the answer: “But, Mr. Brooks, aren’t you meant to be the expert on that?”
At night he often lay awake and tried to visualize the different ways in which disaster might strike. It would be a will in which the percentage shares of the residuary estate were found to total more than a hundred. It would be a trust where the remainder vested in a dead person. There would be angry voices and pointing fingers, and the initials “S.B.” on the guilty copy in the files would be the death warrant from which there was no appeal. Ah, well, he sometimes thought, as he wiped the cold drops from his forehead, it might even be a relief to have it over.
When it came at last, it came with an awesome simplicity. Old Titus Baxter died, and in his will he exercised a power of appointment, conferred upon him by his long deceased mother’s will, to prolong a trust for the lifetime of his daughter. It was not one of the complex wills that Brooks had so feared; it was, on the contrary, one of the simple ones that he had applauded. The trouble was that the daughter had been born after her grandmother’s death. This small basic fact, known to all—apparent, indeed, by the very recitals in Titus’ will—had, incredibly enough, been overlooked by the drafting clerk, the senior associate, the partner in charge, and, in the end, by Sylvester Brooks. The exercise of the power had necessarily failed, and a quarter of a million dollars now tumbled, “in default of a valid appointment,” into the lap of old Mrs. Baxter’s unsuspecting but grateful pet charity, the Institute for the Relief of Indigent Descendants of American Revolutionary Officers. It was a mistake that any law student, working in the office for a summer salary would have been expected to pick up. It was indeed a grave question whether Miss Baxter did not have a suit against the firm for malpractice. Only the large bequests to her in other articles of the will might incline her to mercy.
Brooks first learned about it on Monday morning from Morris Madison, the partner in charge of the Baxter estate. The invalidity had been pointed out late Friday by the executor, Standard Trust Company, and Madison had spent the weekend in the office with a team of associates, frantically digging out the law to see if anything could be done to save Miss Baxter’s trust. Nothing could. Madison seemed tired, but resigned.
“I thought you’d better hear about it from me before the partners’ lunch,” he told Brooks. “Of course, we’re all to blame, but the major blame is mine. Some harsh things will undoubtedly be said, and I suggest we sit together, and you let me answer the questions. I don’t know how you feel about this sort of thing, but, frankly, I’m not inclined to be too apologetic. It’s the kind of ridiculous blunder that might have happened to anybody. It’s like an act of God. There’s no point calling it careless. I don’t happen to be a careless lawyer. Unless I’m to be judged by this and this alone.”
Brooks had always regarded Madison as an aloof, superior person, too exalted on his peak of tax brilliance even to scorn such fumbling practitioners as himself. Madison rarely addressed more than a perfunctory greeting to him, except once when he had examined him in astonishing detail about the genealogy of the Tower family. Madison was known in the office for his way of suddenly turning in a corridor to stop people whom he had hardly ever spoken to and asking them rather personal questions. But now Brooks decided that Morris Madison was the first gentleman of the office, and the phoenix that rose from the ashes of his career was a vision of the drama of facing the partners with so gallant an ally. The long heralded crisis had come, but it found him ready. He had felt it as a man for a lifetime; he could dispute it like a man for a day. When he walked into the dining room after Madison, he was even able to smile at the sullen face of Chambers Todd.
Yet Todd was as bad as anyone could have feared. The man had so identified his personal ambition with Tower, Tilney that his agony at the Baxter debacle was as acute as if he had made the error himself. Despite Clitus Tilney’s coughs and hints, he kept returning to the subject, long after the others had accepted Madison’s brief, dignified statement.
“You say it was Jonas McClintock who prepared the original draft?” he demanded of Madison. “Then it was McClintock who made the error of using Miss Baxter as a measuring life?”
“I’ve already told you, Chambers, the responsibility is mine.”
“Never mind this I’m-the-captain-of-my-ship attitude,” Todd snapped with a rudeness that shocked the table. “This isn’t a court-martial, and I don’t give a damn for fancy concepts of responsibility. The point is that we can’t afford to have juniors who make such gaffes. McClintock must go.”
“He’s a good man, Chambers.”
“Oh, rats. He was a good man.”
“You think an associate should not be allowed even one mistake?”
“When it’s a mistake like that, I certainly do! If each of them pulled that kind of bull, we’d be out of business in a year’s time.”
“I think we’ve said about all that can be profitably said on the subject,” Clitus Tilney intervened from the head of the table. “The committee on associates will consider McClintock’s case. No doubt they will give Mr. Todd’s suggestion the weight that it is due. Now may we pass on to other matters?”
Sylvester Brooks, however, was not going to be deprived of his minute in Morris Madison’s finest hour.
“May I say one thing, Mr. Tilney,” he began and then paused to clear his throat impressively. “If there’s any firing to be done, I don’t think it should be confined to associates. My initials are on the office copy of the Baxter will. Chambers Todd may not care about responsibility, but I do. I’m responsible for every clause in that document.”
“We don’t fire partners,” Todd retorted roughly. “That would be firing ourselves. But if we can’t read wills properly, we have to hire young men who can. And might I suggest one thing, Sylvester? If you’d spend less time telling the associates tales of the great past, they might have more time for work and make less mistakes.”
There was a gasp around the table, and Tilney exclaimed sharply: “That will do, Chambers! You’re going too far.” He nodded apologetically down the table at Brooks. “I hope you realize, Sylvester, that the rest of us do not go along with that last remark. I shall now ask Bayard Kip to report on his very interesting conference with Commissioner Caplin on the elimination of tax deductions for business entertaining.”
Brooks uttered no word for the rest of the meal, but kept his eyes fixed, with a concentrated expression of sympathetic interest, on the gravely articulate Mr. Kip. But he was only reflecting that the furies had claws as sharp but no sharper than he had dreaded. The cruelty of Todd had been very terrible, but very anticipatable. Now it was over, and Brooks hoped that he had played his part in the fifth act as becomingly as any of them. There was only one more thing to do before the final curtain, and he did it, immediately after lunch, in Clitus Tilney’s office, standing solemnly before the senior partner’s desk.
“But, my dear fellow, I shan’t permit you to resign,” Tilney said immediately, waving his right hand in expansive protest. “No, no, no. At least not under these circumstances. This thing will blow over, don’t worry. If, when it has and you still wish to retire—as you’re entitled to at your age—that’s another matter. But I won’t have you quitting under fire after forty-five years in this office. Forget about Chambers. His bite may be worse than his bark, but I know how to muzzle him.”
Brooks stared at him with the bewilderm
ent of a supporting actor who finds the star suddenly extemporizing. “But if I stay on, what will I do? How can you use me?”
“Use you?” Tilney demanded in surprise. “Why exactly the way we’ve been using you all along, as our esteemed arbiter of wills!”
“You mean you’d trust me?” Brooks demanded, almost in indignation. “You’d trust me again after this Baxter mess?”
“Of course I’d trust you. I’d trust you with anything, old boy. Now get out of here and go back to work and don’t let me hear another word of this nonsense!”
As Brooks walked down the long corridor from Clitus Tilney’s large office to his own small one, he wondered in a daze whether the final curtain would ever fall between himself and the audience of his own panic. There were no lines now, no play, no scenery even; he was speechless on a deserted stage. He stopped in his doorway as he noticed something in the middle of the clean white blotter on his desk. It was the carbon copy of a will, placed there for his inspection and initialing, placed there fastidiously, so that its sides were parallel with the sides of the blotter, placed there as if to mock him with its neatness and hidden dangers. And somehow hovering over it, unseen but sneering, vaguely fetid, somehow ridiculous, he sensed at last the presence of his ancient specter and understood what it was.
“I’ve been made a fool of,” he whispered with a groan, half in awe at his own discovery. “I’ve been made a perfect fool.”
For the dreaded mistake had come and gone, and nobody cared that he had made it. He had been forgiven because there was nothing to forgive. His job was a form, an ingenious face saver, conceived by a benevolent senior partner to keep an old body occupied. Those initials in the margin were like revenue stamps on a recorded deed. They did not speak for the validity of the document, but for the power of the taxing state. Brooks, however, was not a man to draw out his crisis. He had his cue again. He walked briskly to his chair, put on his glasses and pulled the will towards him. For a moment he examined it without reading a word, then nodded, took off his glasses, reached for his pen and traced with his customary slow care the high blue wavering letters in the margin. If initials were required, initials would be supplied, right up to the last day of his partnership. His recompense to Tilney for what Tilney had tried to do for him would be to conceal his own discovery of the stratagem. If the show had to go on, at least he had found his lines, and with lines an old actor could get through anything.
From Bed and Board
WALDRON P. WEBB had always been proud of the fact, so much deplored by that arch-organizer, Clitus Tilney, that the litigation department of Tower, Tilney & Webb was a firm within a firm. A great trial lawyer, Webb maintained, like a great diva, had to be supported by a large, well-trained cast, and the least interference with any of his law clerks, or even of his stenographers, made the smooth pink cheeks of the senior litigator, so evocative, with his cotton-white hair and round belly, of a jovial Santa, turn to a mottled red and the silky voice to a stertorous clatter. Webb gave his people different hours of work and different salary raises from the rest of the office, and the discord which he thus created, far from being harmful, in his opinion, to the spirit of a law firm, was conducive, he boasted, to the development of the litigious genius. “Can you imagine a Clarence Darrow,” he would demand sarcastically of Tilney, “emerging from that dull grey military academy which you call the corporate department?”
Litigation, indeed, was more than Webb’s profession; it was his catharsis. He was one of those unhappy men who always wake up angry. He was angered by the sparrows outside his bedroom window in Bronxville, by the migraines of his long-suffering wife, by the socialism in the newspaper, the slowness of the subway, the wait for the elevator, the too casual greeting of the receptionist. It was only the great morning pile on his desk of motions, attachments and injunctions that restored his calm. Sitting back in his red plush armchair under the dark lithograph of an orating Daniel Webster, facing his secretary and two chief law clerks, he would open the day with a rattling dictation of letters and memoranda. Gradually, as he talked and telephoned, as he stamped again and again on the hydraheaded serpent of presumption that daily struck anew at his clients with the forked tongues of legal subterfuge, as he defeated motion with countermotion, question with accusation, commitment with revocation, the earlier irritations of the morning subsided, the Santa Claus began to predominate over the Scrooge, and Waldron P. Webb assumed his midday look of benevolent, if rather formidable cheer.
There was one type of case, however, that, instead of calming his nerves, aroused the same fury evoked by the morning sparrows and newspapers, and that was divorce. Webb claimed, like most lawyers in the financial world, that he handled divorces only for old and valued clients, paying the conventional lip service to the downtown tradition that matrimonial matters were not merely unpleasant and sticky, but bad pay. Yet the fact remained that he handled a considerable number of such cases, and, in some instances, for total strangers. Clitus Tilney had deeply angered him once, at a firm lunch, by commenting with a snorting laugh, in relation to a much publicized decree which Webb had obtained depriving a young wife of custody of her children, on the “sex antagonism” latent in the divorce bar. It was simply not true. At least it was not true of Waldron Webb. When he represented a wife he pursued the husband with exactly the same angry passion. All he had to do was to see a spouse on the other side of an issue, and his heart began to swell with the indignation of one who at the helm of a storm-tossed ship hears that a careless sailor has left open a porthole. Waldron Webb had been a faithful husband to an ailing wife for thirty years. He felt that he was no hypocrite in exacting high standards of others.
The bitterest of these cases began on a bitter winter morning when the subway had been particularly slow, the receptionist more than usually offhand and the morning pile of mail disappointingly small. There was really no excuse to keep his first appointed caller waiting more than half an hour, and at eleven o’clock he received a slim, handsome, agile man of thirty-odd, with thick curly hair, already grey, a light, almost a child’s, skin and troubled eyes, who had been referred to him by the president of the Standard Trust Company. Peyton Hobart was a name associated in Webb’s mind with Cholly Knickerbocker, polo and Westbury, but the antagonism so initially aroused was soon subdued by his visitor’s air of deference and by the fact that in downtown territory and dressed in a business suit (Hobart worked, apparently, in his family’s insurance business) he had the look of a schoolboy on Sunday, yearning for green fields, but obliged for morning chapel to encase his neck in a white collar and his body in blue serge.
“I’ve always thought Georgette and I had a perfect marriage,” he was saying. “You could have knocked me down with a feather when she told me she was in love with Tommy Gwinnett. We’ve been married thirteen years. You may laugh, Mr. Webb, but that’s a long time in our crowd. Maybe it’s our bad luck year.” He shook his head with a charming, if despondent smile. “Or maybe we’re not as different from the others as I’ve always liked to think.”
“What did you tell Mrs. Hobart?”
“What was there to tell? She did all the telling. She told me she wanted a divorce.”
“And you agreed?”
Hobart looked up in surprise. “Well, how can I hold on to a woman who doesn’t want to stay? And would I want to if I could?”
Webb, with a little grunt, proceeded to elicit the vital statistics. He did this in the offhand fashion of a doctor, who, concealing his own awareness of his patient’s natural embarrassment, asks him to strip. Peyton Hobart had two children, a boy and a girl. He had securities worth three quarters of a million and expected as much more on his mother’s death. Georgette, aside from considerable jewelry, had nothing. It was always astonishing, Webb reflected, how relatively poor society people were. He himself had a larger income than Hobart, and could he have dreamt of polo ponies?
He turned to more personal matters. Had Mr. Hobart ever misbehaved himself? No, he d
id not mean drinking or flirting; he meant only one thing. No? Mr. Hobart was quite sure? He would be safe, in the event of a New York divorce proceeding? What about Mrs. Hobart?
“Really, Mr. Webb, I don’t want to hurt Georgette. She’s been a perfectly good wife, up until now. It’s not her fault that she’s fallen for this guy. Most of her friends have.”
“Then you propose to let her go?”
“I suppose I must.”
“And to make her a settlement?”
“Well, doesn’t a wife always get something? I want to do the right thing.”
“And the children? She’s to have the children, too, I assume?”
“If it’s customary.”
“Customary?” Webb’s voice rose shrilly. “I don’t know the word! You don’t come to a lawyer like Waldron P. Webb if all you want is to be the docile American husband who hands his fortune and children over to the man who’s seduced his wife!”
A faint pink, of irritation and surprise, appeared in the upper sections of Hobart’s long, narrow cheeks. “See here, Mr. Webb, we don’t have to go that far. Tommy Gwinnett’s not exactly an adventurer, you know. We were both in the Fly Club, and he’s a good deal richer than I am.”
“I don’t ‘know’ anything about Mr. Gwinnett. Except that he’ll certainly be richer than you are when he has your money. Why, if he’s so well off, does Mrs. Hobart need anything from you? Why can’t he take care of her?”
This at last seemed to strike Hobart, for he frowned and nodded. “There’s something in that, isn’t there?” he exclaimed, with naive surprise. “This whole thing was Gwinnett’s idea. Let Gwinnett pay for it!”
“Let him indeed,” Webb agreed promptly, sighing inwardly at such evidence of a flightiness that augured ill for the success of prolonged negotiations. “And now to the question of the children. Have you stopped to consider that if your wife has custody, Mr. Gwinnett will be their real father? Oh, I know, you’ll see them on Saturday afternoons.” Webb’s shrug and raised hand anticipated Hobart’s argument. “If it’s convenient. And you’ll take them to the circus. And you’ll be allowed, perhaps, to sit in the second pew when they’re married.” Webb half closed his eyes as he sat back to deliver, with mocking softness, his customary lecture. “You’ll be the man with the perpetual lollypop, trying to amuse the unamusable. Intruding a woebegone, unwanted face into a tightly knit family group. Too alien to be confided in. Too pathetic to be disliked. And no matter how successful in business you may be, to them you’ll always be the man Mummy left.” Here he paused ominously. “All that, of course, is the best you can hope for. The worst is that she’ll shut you out altogether and change their name to Gwinnett.”
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