Powers of Attorney

by Louis Auchincloss

  Mrs. Tyng presented herself the next morning, dressed discreetly in navy blue, but she did not seem very scared. She chatted volubly yet modestly with all of Miss Shepard’s group, with old Colonel Townsend, the collector of doorknobs, with Mrs. Potts, the richest widow of the resort, with Tommy Landon, the golden-haired, epicene muralist who had been their “youth” for twenty years. They all agreed that she was charming—and impenetrable.

  “I’ll bet it’s nothing but an act,” Miss Shepard suggested, enjoying the independence of seeming to depreciate her own protégée. “If I wanted to crash ‘us,’ I’d try to seem mysterious. Here we are, all talking about her past when she probably doesn’t even have one!”

  All that summer Miss Shepard never gave a big party without asking Mrs. Tyng, and her delight in her new neighbor steadily increased. The latter seemed ready and able to exercise upon her aging group of pleasure seekers the rejuvenating influence of a Madame de Pompadour in the court of Louis XV. It was Emmaline Tyng who organized picnics by buckboard along the old carriage trail to Porpoise Rock where they could watch the sun plunge behind the Green Mountains and the cold sapphire sea turn to a phosphorescent ebony. It was Emmaline who thought of renting the old tea house on top of Hamlin Hill and serving a champagne lunch before the panorama of pine forests and crags. It was Emmaline who organized the tombola lunches at the swimming club and who got Sunny Dixie from the North Shore to play at the Tennis Week ball.

  “She’s taken us over, Johanna,” Mrs. Potts told Miss Shepard at the end of Emmaline’s first season. “She’s taken us over, and we’re all the better for it. You were right, my dear. I had my doubts at first, but I should have known. You’re always right.”

  Miss Shepard accepted the compliment as simply her due. She had already conceived the idea of her new friend as a successor to herself, as a person who would preserve and maintain in a chaotic future some of the standards of hospitality and graciousness of the old Anchor Harbor. Like a late Roman emperor, she now began to invest her adopted heir with the purple and to insist that equal honors be rendered. She and Emmaline were inseparable, a sort of Mutt and Jeff, as in her own brusque way she liked to put it. Heads turned at noon at the swimming club to watch them cross the lawn to what was now their umbrella table: Miss Shepard, so tall and broad shouldered and big chested, so lanky and pale and long nosed, and yet at the same time so frilly and flowery and gauzy, hobbling like a rolling vessel with her cane, one hand on the shoulder of Mrs. Tyng, so round and smiling, so bouncing and vivacious, so simply and impeccably dressed, so giggling, as much aware of all who were looking on as her companion seemed aloof. They had even developed a special way of talking to each other, an elaborate exchange of mannered truculences.

  “Don’t bring anything to my friend, Mrs. Tyng,” Miss Shepard would say gruffly to the white-coated waiter who hurried to take their order. “Unless it’s a glass of tomato juice. I’m afraid she overindulged last night.”

  “It’s true, Johanna. I found myself in some pretty bad company.

  “Is that so? I heard you were seen about with a respectable old body, a most virtuous spinster. I trust you did not expose the poor dear to the temptations of your fleshpots.”

  “The poor dear, indeed! There’s a smell of brimstone in the very daisies on her straw hat!”

  The waiter would smile and bow and bring them their martinis as usual.

  If the friendship, however, in its early stages, might have suggested the Well-Beloved and his Pompadour, alas, it was not the sovereign who was the first to be bored. Emmaline Tyng, having established her rule at Miss Shepard’s, began, as early as her third summer, to sigh, like another conqueror, for more worlds. There were a number of old summer families, older even than the Shepards, particularly from Boston, who held aloof from the social life of the swimming club, in dowdy shingled isolation, without lawns or formal gardens, who came to Maine only for the sea air and the pine trees and whose wives and widows were to be observed padding along the sides of roads in sweaters and sneakers, even sometimes pushing bicycles. Of such were the Motley Goodriches, regarded by Miss Shepard, and by her parents before her, as the natural targets of summer levity. She really stared when Emmaline suggested that they be included in a charade party.

  “My dear, they’re the most terrible frumps. What on earth put that idea in your head?”

  “They have that divine old turreted castle on Porpoise Point. Wouldn’t it be fun to give a picnic there?”

  Miss Shepard, to tell the truth, was becoming the least bit tired of picnics. Even with the efforts of her old chauffeur who toted a camp chair and wrapped her knees in a steamer blanket, her limbs tended to stiffen in the night air.

  “My father used to say that Anchor Harbor had never recovered from two things: the road up Hamlin Hill and the Goodriches’ August clambake.”

  But Emmaline simply smiled the formal smile of the child who knows that she has only to wait till teacher’s back is turned, and a week later Miss Shepard had the mortification of learning that invitations had gone out to a charade party without finding one in her own mail.

  “Of course I’d have asked you,” Emmaline pointed out when she protested. “Only I was afraid you’d be bored to death. The Goodriches are coming. If you think you can stand them, come along!”

  Miss Shepard came to her friend’s party and was very gracious indeed to the Goodriches, but she did not delude herself about the extent of her concession. She could tell, from the more pebbly note in Emmaline’s Southern chatter, that her heir no longer expected to await her demise before coming into possession of her rights. It was soon only too clear that Miss Shepard’s younger cohort in the imperial purple intended to enroll the entire colony under her standard. It was not enough for her to assemble a chosen few around the best umbrella table at the swimming club and live with the satisfying knowledge that there was nobody on that long lawn by the swimming pool who would not have gladly exchanged his canvas chair for one at that charmed circle. No, such were the joys of mere society creatures. Emmaline’s ambition was more imperial. She wanted to know the old families and the new, the smart and the dowdy. She wanted to give lawn parties that were like palace receptions, to control the clubs, to sponsor the debutantes and hand out the silver cups at Tennis Week. She wanted the admiral to call first at her house when the fleet came in. She wanted, in short, to be Mrs. Anchor Harbor.

  But only of the summer colony. She had no interest in the “natives” or in the village fathers except to form committees to protest their real estate taxes. Emmaline subscribed to the prevailing opinion on the Shore Path that the Anchor Harborites existed only to “do” the summer people and went to Miami every winter to spend their ill-gotten gains. Miss Shepard, on the other hand, conceived of her relationship with the village people more as that of a landed aristocrat with the local peasantry. Old ties and obligations held them together with a bond that was stronger than any between herself and mere summer swallows from distant metropolises. Did not Mr. Durand, the druggist, remember her mother’s heart flutter pills? Had not Mr. Wiley, who ran the Anchor Motor Company, started his business with a loan from her father?

  It was not surprising, then, that the ultimate break between the two friends should have come over Miss Shepard’s policy of sponsoring natives for membership in the swimming club.

  “I think,” Emmaline announced at a board meeting, with a little smile at the gentlemen on either side, which betrayed a preconcerted move, “that, with all due respect to Miss Shepard, the time has come for an ‘agonizing reappraisal’ of our admissions policy. We have at the moment not one, but two local candidates up for consideration.”

  Miss Shepard decided immediately that so open a mutiny called for the sternest measures. “The Durands and the Wileys,” she said gravely, “have been in Anchor Harbor since the end of the eighteenth century. I suggest we consider their qualifications in the light of how long some of our more recent members have been here.”

  But E
mmaline positively snatched at the gauntlet so thrown. “I never heard that membership went according to length of squatting,” she exclaimed with a hard little laugh. “Why not take in the seals and the moose and have done with it? It seems to me that the clear duty of this board is to preserve a club that will continue to attract new and desirable families to Anchor Harbor. And you won’t do that by filling it with a parcel of druggists and haberdashers!”

  “At least,” Miss Shepard retorted, “we know where their money comes from.”

  Emmaline flushed deeply and lost control of her temper. “You needn’t take that tone, Johanna!” she cried shrilly. “Everyone knows that the Shepards only came here because they couldn’t make the grade in Newport!”

  Miss Shepard stared down at the green cloth on the table of the committee room without deigning to reply. She was not surprised when her candidates were blackballed. She was not even surprised, a few days later, when she had resigned from the board, to receive a purely formal letter of thanks for the two decades of her service on it. Mrs. Tyng had won, and words, of course, would never again be exchanged between them. The umbrella table on the other side of the brick steps leading down to the lawn would henceforth be occupied by a rival group.

  Yet it was not one of her satisfactory rows. Anchor Harbor was too small a place for a serious feud, particularly if one’s enemy lived next door. Emmaline had taken to having music at her evening parties, and it was terrible for Miss Shepard to be kept awake by the sounds of a frivolity in which she was no longer included. Worse still was the modern pavilion for suppers and dancing which her neighbor proceeded to erect, at obviously great cost, on the rocks overlooking the sea directly abutting Miss Shepard’s border. It was not simply that the pavilion obstructed Miss Shepard’s own view that angered the latter; it was that it blocked the shore path, so the sailors and their girls, who had formerly done their necking at the end, just beyond Emmaline’s house, now did it on the rocks in plain sight of Miss Shepard’s porch. When she wrote to the Mayor’s office to protest Mrs. Tyng’s arbitrary action in closing off a public easement, she received the mysterious answer that the Village Board of Anchor Harbor had by “mesne conveyance” transferred the “public easement over the lands of Emmaline Tyng” to Emmaline Tyng herself. After that there was nothing for Miss Shepard to do but close her windows to the making of music and her shades to the making of love and await with a vibrant indignation the annual August visit of Waldron P. Webb.

  Miss Shepard’s relationship with her lawyers had been the most satisfactory of her life. She knew that they flattered her, but it was nice that there were still people who cared enough to do that. In fact, the partners and associates of Tower, Tilney & Webb, alone of the reading public, seemed to take literally the legend of the “formidable dowager” evoked by Messrs. Amory and Knickerbocker. In their Wall Street offices she could play to sympathetic countenances her favorite and inconsistent roles: the shrewd old girl whose flare for business was worth a library of book-learning and the art-loving, beauty-loving, “fay” creature who had no comprehension of the deeds and mortgages and leases that made up her little brownstone empire. She suspected that if admiring Johanna Shepard was a lawyers’ game, it was a game, nonetheless, that they enjoyed playing, from the receptionist, with her emphatic “And how are you, Miss Shepard?” to Mr. Webb’s secretary who came beaming to the reception hall to greet her, to the nice young law clerks who smiled so feelingly and seemed to have so much time to give her. There was none of the casualness to be found now in the oldest banks and even in the oldest Fifth Avenue stores; a Shepard there was a gold coin that still rang with its full value.

  With Waldron Webb, who had triumphed over the unspeakable woman who had sued her father’s estate, alleging the most terrible things, she had developed something like a friendship. He was actually less congenial than Mr. Madison of the Tax Department or Mr. Buck in real estate, but Miss Shepard was so anxious to keep him close to her, in case that filthy hand from the cesspool world should ever strike again, that she invited him and his wife for a long weekend every summer in Anchor Harbor. Actually, she rather enjoyed the importance of this “visit of counsel,” with its implications to the community that her affairs in the distant simmering city were too important to go even three months without a conference. She would give a small dinner for the Webbs on their last night, and she had contrived to make invitations to this party seem like tokens of her especial favor. “Mr. Webb is tired and hates parties,” she would murmur at the umbrella table, “but I think if we had just a congenial few, we might get him going on one of his cases.”

  Webb himself was a trying visitor, almost impossible to entertain. He was one of those lawyers who were frankly bored by everything but the practice of law. He was a big, stout choleric man, with a loud gravelly voice that was made for the crossexamination of hostile witnesses and not for gossip under the umbrellas. He indulged in no known sport, would not even swim, and expressed his contempt for the country in the uncompromising black of his baggy linen suit and the damp cigar that was always clenched between his yellow molars. He wandered about the house, pulling books out of the bookcases which he would then abandon with a snort, and asking for whiskey at unlikely hours. Mrs. Webb, the kind of forlorn creature that loud, oratorical men are apt to marry, contemplated him with nervous eyes, hoping, perhaps, that he would wait until they were alone before abusing her.

  He brightened, however, on the visit when she told him of her troubles with Mrs. Tyng, his nostrils whiffing immediately the gamy scent of a law suit.

  “I shouldn’t dispute the Village of Anchor Harbor’s right to release its easement to all the landowners on the Shore Path,” he said, after clearing his throat emphatically, as if to discharge all idle summer accumulations. “But I certainly question its right to release it to one. That smacks of discrimination.”

  “How do you suppose she obtained it?”

  “How?” Webb glared at her as if naïveté were a kind of impertinence. “Why, how else but in the time-honored fashion of crossing the palms of the Village fathers?”

  “Oh, but we’re in New England, Mr. Webb. Things are different here.”

  Webb’s snort was positively joyous. He was the kind of litigator whose fixed belief in the corruption of man gave a buoyancy, almost a gaiety to the moments when he could demonstrate it. He was never satisfied, reading the newspaper, at finding only a single crime. A rapist had to have been led on, a murderer blackmailed, an embezzling politician the cover for a higher-up.

  “Here in New England, as elsewhere, apes will be apes,” he said with a chuckle. “But, of course, it will be uphill work to sue a Maine village in a Maine court. Let me explore first to see if there isn’t an easier way.”

  “How?”

  “Let me prowl around, Miss Shepard. Let an old wolfhound prowl around. I may drop in at the Register’s office and have a glimpse at your title papers. I was trained by a great trial lawyer, John Carter Stokes. He used to tell me: ‘Waldron, remember one thing. Always start at the beginning. If your enemy has a gun, find out if he’s got a license.”

  Webb spent a large part of the next two days in the village, and at mealtimes he seemed preoccupied but content. He said very little and occasionally whistled under his breath. The third day he spent strolling about the place, consulting a crumpled paper that appeared to be a map. Miss Shepard, watching him from the veranda, where she sat with his wife, felt an odd combination of comfort and apprehension. There he was, her legal protector, so large and alien, a strange blob against the radiant blues and greens of the coast line, yet curiously dominating it, as if, an ambassador to a world of sea and pines from the greater world of asphalt and brownstone, he might suddenly assume vice-regal powers and say: “Waves, you are only waves, and trees, you are only trees, and I bring the word that relates you to men.” He seemed to hurl an articulate challenge into the astonished face of eternity, shouting that the rights and prerogatives of Miss Johanna Shepard were
more than the transiently enforceable squatter’s claim of a withered old maid to a bit of top soil on the Atlantic Coast, that they were, on the contrary, fixed and eternal and had their place—their important place—with the mountains and the forests and the tossing sea.

  When he fixed his attention on Mrs. Tyng’s property, on the other hand, when he raised his arm and squinted down it towards her new pavilion, as if he were aiming a rifle, he seemed the very figure of Nemesis, a dark devil from a sulphurous underworld who would destroy the enemies of Johanna Shepard but only at a terrible price to her. It was in this latter guise that he appeared at cocktails one night on the veranda, puffing at that damp cigar and obviously bursting with news that he nonetheless was determined to repress and discipline into more dramatic form.

  “My old sage was right, Miss Shepard,” he began with a pleased sigh, after a long sip of whiskey. “Mrs. Tyng’s gun is not hers. Or at least not all of it. But who cares how much? Who can shoot with part of a gun?”

  “What on earth do you mean?”

  “Simply that the barrel of her gun is yours.”

  Miss Shepard was always frightened when her heart began to beat too hard, and she exclaimed almost querulously: “Please, Mr. Webb, don’t talk to me in riddles.”

  “Very well then. That beautiful new pavilion of your neighbor’s. That very expensive summerhouse. It stands half on your land. I suspected it the other day, but I didn’t believe it until I’d paced it out. Of course a survey will have to prove it, but there’s no doubt at all of the fact.”

  Miss Shepard still gaped. “But how can that be?”

  “You mean how could anyone be such a fool as to erect a structure like that without first making a new survey? But that is typical of such a woman as Mrs. Tyng. Habitually living beyond her means, she will always save in the wrong places. And will lose a pavilion to pick up a hundred bucks.”