Powers of Attorney

by Louis Auchincloss

  Lying awake early the next Monday morning and gazing from the faded shepherdesses of their bedroom wallpaper to the flaking paint of the ceiling, Bayard prepared in his mind, with a grim, tense satisfaction, the things that he would do when he got to the office. He would take the Dahduh income tax returns to Mr. Madison and lay them on his desk with a slight, respectful bow. “If you wish to sign these, here they are, sir. I’m afraid I can no longer be responsible for defrauding the Collector.” He smiled a thin smile as he imagined the habitual look of preoccupation on the long grey face of the senior tax partner as it would dissolve into astonishment. “What’s that? What?” And then anger. Anger and recrimination. Bayard rose quietly so as not to disturb Peggy and went to the window with a suddenly quickening heartbeat to stare down at the back yard of the apartment house with its garbage pails and two bare trees. Would it cost him his partnership? Did he care?

  At breakfast with the children he gave a lecture on the use of “Good morning” instead of “Hi.” In the subway he read the market news and a tax periodical. And all the while his curious exhilaration persisted. He remembered the French duchess in the revolution that his friend Reardon loved to cite, who, on the verge of denying her correspondence with the enemy, suddenly shrugged and said: “No, no, life isn’t worth a lie.” That was it. No boasting of moral superiority, no vulgar dramatic oratory, no affectation of heroism—simply a shrug and a life tossed away. If one was a Kip, there was, after all, a gesture still to be made, a gesture that for all its quietness was a repudiation of rottenness, a repudiation, indeed, of the whole wretched age in which he had to live. Had not the first Bayard Kip been ruined for resisting the Astors? Had not his own great-grandfather lost a fortune by disdaining the bribes of Jim Fisk? They had consciences as simple as the brownstone behind which they had lived, consciences that stemmed from the quaint old days of eighteenth century finance, consciences that antedated the venality of steam and oil. Bayard was grateful to the son of an Armenian rug peddler for providing him with the opportunity to show that the Kips still stood apart.

  Mr. Madison did not disappoint him. His bewilderment and irritation were all that Bayard had hoped.

  “But why do you have to be the judge of what’s a business deduction?” he demanded fretfully. “Why do you have to go snooping into what he uses the yacht for? The client tells you it’s for business. All right, put it in the return that way.”

  “I have. But I won’t sign it.”

  “But Dahduh will blow up—” Madison stopped when he saw Bayard’s shrug. “Look, Bayard, I’m not asking you to do anything dishonest. I simply want you to recognize that if we do make you a partner, it will be largely to work on Dahduh’s matters. He depends on you!”

  “I know he does,” Bayard said grimly. “He depends on my signature. If he’s ever prosecuted, he can always make the defense that his lawyer signed the return.”

  “But damn it all, you can’t know all the uses he puts that yacht to!”

  “That’s just it. I can.”

  “Well, I can’t!” Madison exclaimed angrily, picking up the return. “And I can sign it.”

  “As you wish,” Bayard said quietly and withdrew.

  He did not see Madison again that day, but the real scene occurred that evening when he told Peggy.

  “I think it’s the meanest thing I ever heard!” she wailed. “You’re going to blast your career at the office because I sneered at Mr. Dahduh.”

  “You were right to sneer at him.”

  “But I never thought you’d do anything about it. All I meant was that I didn’t want to see him socially.”

  “You think it’s all right to make your living off a man like that provided you don’t see him socially?”

  “Well, naturally. Hasn’t that always been the rule?”

  “It has never been mine,” Bayard said sternly. “Nor has it ever been that of my family. It may interest you to know that my great-grandfather Kip lost a…”

  “It may not interest me to know it!” she exclaimed fiercely. “It may interest me to know that you care more about your silly family pride than you do about your wife and children! I believe you’re actually happy about this thing. I bet you did it to spite me!”

  Bayard, however, was little touched by her hysteria. After all, the children were not going to starve. Only promotion was at stake, and it was clear that Peggy, a creature of her age, was not willing to sacrifice the smallest part of it for integrity, that she expected him to succumb to the modern sentimentality of basing moral decisions on the material needs of his family. But things were right or things were wrong, and life was only worth living if one acted with some consistency in the face of this simple premise. Peggy’s charge that he was motivated by a desire to hurt her was quite irrelevant. Motives mattered only if one asked for credit, and he was asking for none.

  It was an anticlimax, therefore, the next day, when he was summoned to Madison’s office, to be ushered into the big smiling presence of Inka himself.

  “Bayard, my boy,” he said, putting a thick arm over the younger man’s slim shoulders, “I want you to come straight to Daddy Dahduh when you have doubts about his virtue. Don’t leave the job to poor old Madison here. When I walked into his office this morning I caught him in the act of signing my returns. ‘Hey, there,’ I said, ‘isn’t that Bayard’s job?’ Well, he started to explain, and you should have heard him stammer! The great Morris Madison, the glibbest advocate before the Tax Court! But I gradually made out that you think your friend Inka’s a fraud and a phony. All right, so he’s a fraud and a phony! But don’t you think you owed it to me to come and tell me so yourself?”

  “It wasn’t my place as an associate,” Bayard explained in his gravest manner, “to make that kind of communication to a client of Mr. Madison’s.”

  “Oh, I see,” Inka said, nodding emphatically. “Well, then, let us hope that you may not be an associate forever. But to the question of my poor old yacht. Of course we’ll knock the deduction out of the return. I would have done so myself had I only thought of it. She was originally used for business, but in the past months—you’re quite right—she’s been more of a personal plaything. As a matter of fact, I wonder if the time hasn’t come to get rid of her. Do you know any yacht brokers, Bayard, my friend?”

  They were both grinning at him, Madison and Inka, but Bayard did not grin back. He was disturbed to recognize the sudden little weight in his heart as disappointment, and he remembered what Peggy had said.

  Promotion, when it came, came as it so often does, fast. In two months’ time Bayard was a junior partner with an office overlooking the East River, a full-time secretary and his lunch club dues paid. Peggy was able to redecorate the apartment and have the family pictures cleaned and the silver lacquered. For the little family party at which they celebrated this advancement a butler was hired, and Bayard, sipping his sherry under the now gleaming Rembrandt Peale of General Kip and glimpsing through the freshly painted, open doors of the dining room the glitter of the old candelabra, began to feel that the Kips were coming back to life. It was a bit startling to have life turn out to be as simple as his own principles, to have the ashes of martyrdom so promptly converted into the downy pillows of success, but mightn’t it be the ultimate justification of his lifelong adherence to the creed that a family, with faith and tenacity, could stay on top?

  When he next lunched with his friend Reardon, the latter was in ribald mood.

  “So you’ve decided to be a lady’s maid no longer,” he commented. “You’ve decided to be a marquise.”

  “I figure the knife of your guillotine won’t feel any sharper.”

  “Oh, that knife. It’s dulled with disuse. As dull as your conscience, man.”

  Bayard examined those laughing eyes which so ill concealed their resentment. “I know you think that one pays with a bit of soul for each step up in the great world outside of government,” he retorted. “Yet in my own case I have found just the opposite to be
true. I have found that clients appreciate honest advice, even when it proves expensive to them.”

  “What kind of honest advice?”

  “I was thinking particularly of the propriety or impropriety of certain business deductions.”

  “Oh, that yacht of Dahduh’s,” Reardon said with a snort. “I know all about that. The whole main shaft was split. He stung the Better Brands Company for it, and they’re charging it off as a bad loss this year.”

  Bayard’s unflinching stare reflected nothing. “You suggest that he was going to get rid of the yacht anyway?”

  “I suggest that he was killing two birds with one stone. He got rid of a leaky old tub that might have taken him to the bottom of the sea and acquired instead the lifetime devotion of a brilliant young tax lawyer of unimpeachable respectability. I should say he had a bargain.”

  Bayard opened his lips in a faint smile. “So I’ve been bought, is that it?”

  “Not bought, no. Men like Dahduh don’t buy. They acquire. He needs your advice and the name of your firm, and he’s willing to pay high for it. But what he does with that advice, you’ll never quite know. He has his accountants. And other tax lawyers. On a lower level. And one thing you can be sure of, old man. He’s tipped his hand once to you, and he’s learned not to do it again. All the plays that you’ll see from now on will be straight as arrows.”

  “Can a lawyer ask more?” Bayard queried coolly and turned his attention to the menu.

  Nobody watching Bayard walk back down Wall Street after lunch, carrying his tightly rolled umbrella despite the spring sunshine, would have suspected that he had received the bitterest shock of his life. He nodded with the same quiet gravity to the receptionist as he entered the office and with his usual brief smile to his secretary. But once in his own room, behind a closed door and seated at his desk, he raised his fingertips gently to his temples and closed his weary eyes. Life, he admitted, was too much for his simple philosophy. One tried to do right and one’s wife accused one of spite. One tried to fight wrong, and the enemy turned up after the bout in even richer ermine. Perhaps the lesson of it all was that the appearances to which he had so clung, the old family appearances of honor and scrupulousness, of dignity and aristocratic distinction, were, after all, the only things that could be preserved.

  He opened his top drawer and drew from it a photograph of a small, high-gabled, gingerbread villa in Newport which had just been left to him by his uncle, Maturin Kip, of whose estate it had been one of the few assets. It was a bit crazy looking and in poor repair, but it had been designed by Richard Upjohn in 1853, and it was unique. Bayard and Peggy had been carefully over their accounts and had reluctantly decided that they were not yet in a position to afford a summer place. But now he decided that they would risk it. They would be Mr. and Mrs. Bayard Kip, of New York and Newport. They would be listed in the summer, as well as the winter, Social Register. And the old house, with a new coat of paint and a well-kept lawn, would be a credit again to Bellevue Avenue.

  The “True Story” of Lavinia Todd

  LAVINIA and Chambers Todd had been married for twenty-five years. Almost all of these had been spent in Plandome, Long Island, in two houses, first in a small yellow cube in a development and later in a more pretentious Tudor dwelling in the fashionable residential area. They had been happy, busy years, she taken up with her children and home and he with the demands of his law practice. Life had been too full for them to become too critical of each other. She had taken for granted that behind the dark, stocky figure of her irritable but preoccupied husband there still lurked the boy she had deemed so romantic in their common childhood in Hartford, that with more freedom from the clutching demands of Tower, Tilney & Webb he would have shown the interest in his wife and children of the ideal suburbanite. And he had seemed contented with her neat, chintzy house, her circle of girl friends with whose husbands he sometimes played golf and the decisions (all taken by her) as to the education and social life of the children. Leisure had come, at least to her, as the latter had grown up, but she had managed to use it, in her slow, occasionally clumsy but always determined fashion, in the cultivation of the arts: a French class, a painting class, even a class in current events. Until it had all come abruptly to an end.

  For the children, a boy and a girl, had married early and well, and Chambers, who had now risen to the position immediately under the senior partner, announced to Lavinia that they were moving to the city to take a more active part in the social life necessitated by an expanding practice. They rented an apartment on Park Avenue, had it furnished expensively by a decorator, and Lavinia, when they were not giving dinner parties for visiting executives or being entertained themselves at restaurants, found that she had nothing to do. For Chambers this new life seemed the end to which all of their old had been simply the means. For her the means had been enough.

  It was not that Chambers expected her to do nothing. Far from it. He expected her to improve her bridge game, to develop a circle of friends from the ranks of the Social Register, to become a member of the Colony Club, in brief, to carry the banner of his law firm into places where men could not penetrate. But it was not merely a question of her own disinclination to do these things; it was one of her actual incapacity. She had been pretty enough and bright enough when she had married Chambers; she had been a Smith graduate, after all, and an English major. But somehow with the years her native enthusiasm had degenerated almost to gushiness, her love of home to a habit of talking too much about her children and her nervous intensity, her most attractive gift, to a near shrillness. The freckled sophomore with the winning smile and scattered blond hair was now a matron of large hips and shoulders (she dieted so desperately that, half starved, she would go on eating benders fatal to her purpose), of hair too often waved and too tightly matted to the scalp, of pale skin and firm, square jaw, of dresses with too many colors and hats with too many flowers, and of the big, blue, frightened eyes of a stubborn child. It was inevitable that, confronted with easy, graceful, harshly laughing Manhattan ladies, her diffidence should be intensified to sullenness.

  Chambers was blunt in his criticisms and suggestions. “Stick close to Ada Tilney. She may not seem to have much style, but people respect her, and I’m sure her word at the Colony Club would go a long way. Then there’s Peggy Kip. She may be a bit snooty, but she knows everything and everyone in old New York.”

  “But I don’t care about old New York!” Lavinia protested. “I care about people for what they are, not who they are. Really, Chambers, you’re talking like the most awful snob!”

  “It has nothing to do with snobbishness,” he retorted testily. “It has to do with the good of the firm.”

  “Not just the good of Chambers Todd?”

  “Well, I’m a member of the firm, aren’t I? Your trouble is that you take everything too hard. That’s why you don’t get on better at dinner parties. The other night, at the Gages’ I saw the men on both sides of you talking the other way.”

  “What was I expected to do? Pull them by the ear?”

  “If necessary. But I bet you’d bored them to death talking about the children.”

  “Well, what’s wrong with talking about my children?” Lavinia demanded indignantly. “I’m proud of my children!”

  “Yes, but you can’t expect other people to be.”

  “That fancy Mrs. Newbold you admire so much talks about her children. She held forth all night about how unfair it was that her boy was kicked out of St. Mark’s!”

  “When you occupy a position like Florence Newbold’s,” Chambers replied crushingly, “you can talk about anything you want.”

  What she could never understand was why he got on as well as he did in the world that she found so difficult. He had emerged from a quarter of a century of downtown labor totally ignorant, so far as she could sec, of all fields but law and finance. And even in law, she observed, he had confined himself to the special tools of his corporate practice. She had once read a l
ayman’s history of English jurisprudence in the hope of being able to stimulate him to further conversation in their evenings at home, but he had never heard of the Statute of Quia Emptores or the Rule in Shelley’s case, which the author had seemed to regard as basic. In the arts he lacked even a superficial smattering. Lavinia was convinced that he had never read a play of Shakespeare, unless part of Julius Caesar in high school and that he would not have blinked an eye had she told him that Parsifal was a symphony by Brahms. Yet he did not hesitate now at parties to wade with big feet into discussions of modern art or poetry and to dilute the thin clear streams of intellect with the dirty water of generality until they were full enough for multitudes to splash about in. “What do you suppose a man thinks about when he paints a picture like that?” Lavinia would hear him across the room, standing before their hostess’ Picasso. The heaviness of his approaches was not lightened, either, by his new habit of drinking three cocktails in rapid succession before dinner. After these he tended to become sentimental, his eyes moistened, and he would sometimes place his hand on top of a pretty dinner partner’s as he told her of his long hard climb to the altitude where he was privileged to meet such as her. Ugh!

  “My goodness, what a handsome husband you have!” women would say to her. “One would never dream he was over fifty.” There would be no comment, of course, about her own appearance giving rise to any such incredulity. “Such dark, ruthless looks. One feels Mr. Todd would be a very just judge but a very stern one. That must be why he understands instinctively so many things he couldn’t possibly have had time to study!”

  Well, Lavinia could hardly blame them for being taken in by Chambers’ looks. She had been herself. There had never been room in her heart for any image but that of the clear-skinned, square-jawed, stiffly muscular high school boy who had supported his mother by working in a bakery at night and who had nearly killed poor Hank Porter for asking for a date with Lavinia Frink. But she doubted that he would have won her so easily had he courted her with the eyes that now beamed at Mrs. Newbold, the eyes of a small boy preparing to blow out a birthday candle.