Powers of Attorney

by Louis Auchincloss

“Beyond her means? What makes you say that?”

  “I had a little talk with the president of the local bank. Mrs. Tyng is well known as bad pay among the tradespeople. If she loses her pavilion I doubt that she can build another. And the beauty of it all is that she’s been hoist by her own petard. Her only possible defense to an action in trespass would be entrapment: that you had knowingly watched the construction of the pavilion and bided your time. But by closing the shore path (which I find she accomplished by the simple expedient of giving a garden party for the Mayor’s wife) she shut off your view of what was going on. It’s too perfect!”

  “You mean, I can simply tell her … to remove her pavilion?”

  “Or remove it yourself. At least, the trespassing half. There is absolutely not a thing she can do about it.”

  The Webbs extended their visit until a survey had been duly made, and when they left Miss Shepard was in possession of a map that showed, with a terrifying precision, how the purple line of the Shepard-Tyng boundary neatly bisected the poor little oval that represented the expensive pavilion. Miss Shepard carried the survey about in her pocket and kept pulling it out and furtively examining it. Each time she had to reassure herself that this dizzy vision of inconceivable power was not the illusion of a premature senility. No, each time, there was that line slicing through the offending pleasure dome with the laminating edge of an executioner’s sword. It was justice, the strong, dazzling justice that falls with the final curtain of a well-made melodrama.

  Webb had pleaded with her to allow him to call upon Mrs. Tyng, survey in hand, and to present her with his demands, but she had insisted on time to think it over, and he had departed sulkily for the city, deprived of his well-earned scene. She sympathized with his disappointment, but she wanted to savor her triumph. She had reached an age where she knew that there was no greater joy than anticipation. At her umbrella table at the club, when she heard Emmaline Tyng’s high, shrill laugh, the particularly high one that was designed to create at Miss Shepard’s table the uneasy sense that its occupants were targets of the Tyng wit, she would smile grimly and reach a finger into her handbag to touch the folded paper that she always kept there. Similarly, at night, when the offensive strains of dance music were wafted across the lawn from the doomed pavilion to Miss Shepard’s window, she had only to reach a hand to the table by her bed and sink into gentle slumber at the reassuring touch of the survey. She felt younger and gayer than she had for many a summer, and it was not long before her mood began to be felt at the Tyng table where it caused suspicious glances. What in the name of Hamlin Hill was the old girl up to?

  She could not, however, live indefinitely on anticipation. Labor Day was approaching, and soon the summer swallows would be gone. Miss Shepard rose one afternoon from the wicker chair on her veranda, reached for her stick and strode slowly across her lawn. As she paused in the little path through the copse that separated her property from Mrs. Tyng’s, she opened her bag to take one last quick look at the survey. It was safely there. Erect again, she proceeded up her enemy’s lawn and around the house to the big porte-cochere. But as she passed under it and placed her foot on the first of the big stone steps, her heart began beating so rapidly that she stopped in terror. Was she going to die and miss her famous scene? Breathing hard, she sat down on the top of the steps and rested her chin in her hands.

  After only a few moments, her heart resumed its normal beat, but her exhilaration seemed to have vanished with her panic. As she gazed back at her own house, viewed from the now unaccustomed angle of her enemy’s fort, it appeared suddenly, like her spirits, a poor sad jumble of weatherbeaten things. The heat of the day, the stillness of the air, the buzz of bees in the clematis on Mrs. Tyng’s driveway, were all oppressive and stifling. She herself was an old, weak, about-to-be-dead female, and the paper in her pocket was a fable for children.

  Where was reality? What had happened to hers? It had fled the hot void of out-of-doors to find refuge somewhere behind the screened doorway in the wide, dark, shade-drawn interior of Mrs. Tyng’s domain. In the sunlight, amid the buzzing bees, lingered the attenuated ghosts of fantasy, walked with faltering feet the old maid “queen” of Anchor Harbor, Amory’s “formidable dowager” and the all-powerful client of Waldron Webb. Miss Shepard understood at last that she would destroy herself in destroying the pavilion, that Anchor Harbor would unite behind an injured Emmaline. For the rivalries of a summer colony had to be played by the gentle rules of parlor games. To bring a blunderbuss from the distant city of true conflicts and blast away would be to stand up suddenly, like Alice in Wonderland, and show that the community was only a pack of cards. But she could not wake up like Alice; she had to live with those cards, and how long could one live in a cardboard world as the legend of Waldron Webb?

  “Who is that out there?” came a shrill, suspicious voice from behind the screen door. “Who is it sitting out there?” There was a pause, but Miss Shepard said nothing. “Is that you, Johanna Shepard? What do you want? Are you ill?” Now the screen door opened, and Miss Shepard heard the quick tap of high heels on the porch behind her. “Shall I call a doctor?”

  She rose slowly now, very slowly, and turned to gaze calmly into those bright, agitated black eyes. “I’m all right, Emmaline,” she said quietly. “I think I must have had a touch of the sun. I came over to tell you that I couldn’t endure our silly quarrel any longer. Will you forgive me and make up?”

  There was another pause in which those black eyes seemed to penetrate every inch of Miss Shepard, even to the handbag with the folded paper.

  “Well, of course,” Emmaline said at last with a perfunctory little snort, “it’s all too ridiculous, isn’t it? Come in, my dear. Come in and let’s talk it over.”

  As she held open the screen door, Miss Shepard moved painfully forward. One thing and one thing alone sustained her. Under the scrutiny of those suspicious eyes it had flashed upon her that there was still a way in which the last word might be hers, a way in which Emmaline could be made to learn, without embarrassment to her friend, of the latter’s dread but unexercised power. When Johanna Shepard had gone to take her place in the Chancellor’s mausoleum on top of a wooded hill by the Hudson River, it would be the duty of Waldron Webb to instruct Mrs. Tyng that his client’s will contained a devise to her of a small strip of land in Anchor Harbor.

  The Crowning Offer

  CLITUS TILNEY had had to work all his life to keep melancholia at bay. The attacks were never so severe as to require the help of a rest home or even of a prolonged vacation, but the disease made up in persistence for what it may have lacked in intensity. He had long recognized that it was his doom to live on the outskirts of a mild, damp hovering fog that tended to creep slowly towards him when he was not watching. As soon as he became aware of the first wispy tentacles stealing about his eyes and ears, he would shake himself and dispel them by enumerating all the things from which he was deriving any present satisfaction. The new bond issue was going well; the firm gross would be larger that year than last; the Columbia Law School had asked him to preside over a symposium on changes to the Federal Securities Law. On some occasions he could dispel the grey cloud simply by recalling that he was going to a good concert that night or that he and Ada were expecting amusing people for dinner. But then there were the days when the fog was naggingly persistent and when he had to turn on all the fans of his imagination to blow it back, days when the very whirring of these mental motors kept him from attending properly to business. Such a day was the day when he received the telephone call from the President of Barnes College.

  He was working in his office with Jake Platt, studying exhibits for the government’s second anti-trust suit against the investment banking firms, of which no less than three were his clients. It was one of those early spring days of unexpected heat, and his winter tweeds hung about him with a damp heaviness. Ahead lay months of what promised to be a very dull case—a case that could be won only by the production of mountains and
mountains of correspondence—and his trip to Scandinavia with Ada had had to be put off. Two good friends had died in the preceding winter, each at precisely his age, fifty-eight, and he was beginning to think, as well as to feel that all the good things in life were past. It particularly bothered him that the firm’s new offices, the magnificent new offices for which he had been responsible and of which he had been so proud, struck him already as rather showy and shabby. No, shabby, of course, was too strong; they were not shabby. They were simply like … well, like other people’s offices.

  “What a commentary on our society an anti-trust case is!” he exclaimed with a snort. He was standing at the window, his back to Jake, leaning forward as he stared out over the harbor. “What a grotesque parody of our ideals! If you put one on as a show in a Communist country, everyone would laugh their heads off. Can’t you see Uncle Sam as a schoolmaster applying his ruler to the knuckles of pupils who won’t compete? ‘I smell a conspiracy! Prove to me there’s none.’ ‘Oh, no, Uncle,’ the defendant protests. ‘I promise you I competed. I put a spoke in Johnny Jones’ bicycle wheel so he sprained his ankle. And I spilled ink all over Billy Smith’s notes and messed up Fred Doe’s athletic clothes. So I was the pupil with the best attendance and the cleanest copy book and the neatest locker!’ And Uncle Sam relents and quashes his anti-trust suit.”

  “Would you rather do things the Communist way?” Jake asked, without looking up. He was used to the master’s moods. “Would you like to cut out competition?”

  Tilney slapped the windowpane. “I’m sick and tired of this modern habit of impugning a man’s patriotism every time he enunciates the smallest criticism of how things are done here. Will you deny, Jake, that there’s something radically wrong with a system that requires a defendant to prove himself a son of a bitch to beat a criminal indictment?”

  “It depends what you mean by a son of a bitch,” Jake said, shrugging. “I suppose you’re thinking of Shelby Gage’s telling old Art Hunter that he was pulling out of the bond business when he was secretly trying to grab three of his best bond men. But that’s part of the game. It’s like poker.”

  “And a game, I can see, that you find precious little difficulty playing,” Tilney retorted. “You belong to your times. That’s all right, I’m not sneering.”

  “Not much.”

  “I’m not, believe me. I’m the one who’s out of joint. Why don’t you turn me over to the Un-American Affairs Committee? I feel in a mood for Un-American affairs.”

  “Perhaps you’re tired,” Jake suggested, looking up at last.

  “I’m not tired.”

  “All right, all right.”

  Tilney remained at the window in the silence that followed, reflecting that Jake would be twice as good a lawyer with ten percent more imagination. But then, in all honesty, he had to speculate whether it would have been possible for Jake to be twice as good a lawyer. Jake was pretty good. But, damn it all, that was just it. Tilney was weary of lawyers who were simply good lawyers. Jake had no juice. He had brains and looks and even charm, in his stubborn American way, but he had no juice. Tilney sighed, wondering, if he and Ada had had a son, whether he would have been a Jake. Probably. The telephone rang.

  “No, I’ll get it, you’re working, I’m doing nothing,” he muttered irritably as he turned to pick up the instrument for which Jake was reaching. As soon as he heard the high, faintlyquavering, far away tone of Albert Berringer, he felt an easing of the pressure about his heart, as if his veins had been injected with a fast operating drug, and he ached again with his old nostalgia for the oblong green campus of Barnes and its quaint, rusty-red, somber Romanesque buildings, dignified in the quiet, melancholy way of upstate New York in the ’seventies.

  “Clitus, my boy, it’s Albert. Are you alone?”

  “Except for my faithful Jake,” Tilney replied with a little grimace at his most junior partner. “You remember Jake Platt, who did the amendments to the charter? My right hand?”

  “I remember him well, and gratefully, and please give him my best,” the high voice continued. “But do crave his indulgence for an old man and tell him that I wish to speak with you on a matter of the greatest confidence.”

  “How mysterious you are today, Albert. But all right.” Here he winked at Jake and pointed to the door. “Now we are quite alone,” he continued when Jake had left, “unless Miss Hanley at the switchboard is listening in. Are you, Miss Hanley?”

  “Clitus, I am going to ask you to do something crazy. Something against what most people would consider your best interests. But before you say no, before you turn me down flat, hear me out. I know what a brilliant and successful man you are. Nobody knows better. You’ve pulled your poor old Alma Mater out of the hole more than once. As a leader of the bar you could look to a judgeship, even the Supreme Court, if our Republican friends ever get back in. And, of course, I know you make oodles of money, even if you do have to give most of it to the government.”

  “What is this? A Valentine?”

  “Clitus, listen to me. You know I have to retire. You know the difficulties we’ve had finding a new president.”

  “Hell’s bells, man, aren’t I chairman of your board? Haven’t I been beating the bushes for you these last six months?”

  “That’s what I mean. You know what a job it is.”

  “Albert,” Tilney said with a groan, “will you come to the point?” But when he swallowed, he bit his lips until he was sure he had drawn blood.

  “Clitus, listen to me. I woke up the other night with a brainstorm. I thought: What about Clitus? Oh, sure he’s too big a man for the job—everybody would say he’d be mad to take it. But I began thinking he grew up here, and he loves the old school, and maybe now that he’s made his pile and is no longer in his first youth, he might like the academic life for a change. Maybe he’d appreciate the chance to make something big of Barnes, something that an old fuddy like myself could never dream of. Maybe he’d get a kick out of turning his Alma Mater into the leading intellectual small college of the Eastern Seaboard. Maybe—”

  “My God, Albert!”

  “I don’t want an answer right away. I’m afraid I know what that answer would be. I’ve sounded out your fellow trustees, and they all say I’m crazy to think you’d even consider it.”

  “What makes them so damn sure?”

  “Don’t try to answer me now, Clitus. Think it over, my friend. And try to dwell on the pleasanter aspects of it. You could teach courses yourself, you know. In government or economics. Presidents do in small colleges. I know you’d like that kind of contact with young men. And maybe you could even start a law school. We need a law school up here.”

  “Look, Al, I —”

  “No answer now, Clitus. Please.”

  “Al, will you listen!”

  “No. As a matter of fact, I’m going to hang up right now. I won’t even talk to you if you call back!” And the old man hung up.

  For the first time that he could remember Tilney closed his door and locked it. He telephoned to Miss Clinger and told her to take his calls.

  “Is something wrong Mr. Tilney? You sound so tense.”

  “Just do as I say,” he snapped and did not bother afterwards to regret the sharpness of his tone. Miss Clinger was used to him. He was her job. Would she like to go to Barnes? Of course not. Nobody but Clitus Tilney wanted to go to Barnes.

  It had been his dream from boyhood. He still saw himself, after a lecture, descending from the rostrum and walking out to the fountain in the middle of the campus, followed by the brightest of the class, to continue the discussion informally with cigarettes. He saw the young men everywhere, on his doorstep, in his study, beside Ada as she poured tea, the young men who would take no easy answer, who would wrestle with every dogma, who would squeeze out of him every thought they could. He heard his own voice and laugh; he saw himself admired, even a bit revered. Oh, it was a harmless fantasy—or at least it had been. Unless it now became a fact? He sat at hi
s desk and pounded his temples with his fists as though physically to drive away the objections that swarmed, the objections that were gathering like locusts, the host of them that would soon darken his sky and beat at his eyes.

  “Why can’t I be happy?” he moaned aloud. “Is it too much to ask to be happy in the few good years that may remain?”

  Barnes had everything. It was small enough to be exempt from the vulgarity of athletic excesses, small enough to be totally directed by one man. As senior trustee he knew all about the graduates, the board, the finances. There was nothing he could not accomplish at Barnes! And then to be free of the little meannesses, the cloying demands of clients, to be able to espouse a higher ideal than the particular case one was handed, to serve the muses and them alone, to love truth, with long summers in which to travel, perhaps to write—well, after all, why not? At fifty-eight?

  When he unlocked his door, he went straight to Chambers Todd’s office. Todd was also a Barnes graduate, which was why, as a young man, he had come to Tilney for a job. He was not yet a trustee, but as chairman of the alumni fund he was active in college affairs, and would probably have heard of Berringer’s proposition. Berringer was a great talker. Tilney pushed his head in the doorway and found him dictating.

  “Come to lunch.”

  “Sorry, Clitus, I’m tied up.”

  “Untie yourself, then.”

  Todd looked up quickly to see if he was serious and saw that he was. It was rare for Tilney to be dictatorial, but all his partners knew and respected such moods. Todd gave his secretary instructions about breaking his engagement, took up his hat and walked after Tilney down the corridor. Neither spoke until ten minutes later, when they were seated at a table at the Down Town Association. Tilney, who rarely drank at noon, ordered a martini.

  “Berringer just called. I suppose you know what he wanted.” Todd shrugged. “I told him to save his breath. That there wasn’t a chance.”

  “Oh, you did, did you? Why did you assume that?”