When a vacancy on the Appellate Division prompted gossip that the governor might appoint Arnold to the seat, he discussed the situation candidly with Rod over lunch at the Downtown Association.
“But what would happen to the firm?” the latter expostulated in dismay.
“Oh, it would get along. Nobody’s indispensable. And there’s a side of me that would like the chance to philosophize a bit about the law. As judges can. I like to see our law as a continuing process. I want to trace our notions back to the old writs in common law.”
“How many judges do that?”
“Well, call me Oliver Wendell Holmes, damn it all! Call me Cardozo! Can’t there be anything in my life but Dillard Kaye? Must I go to my grave representing more or less flawed characters? I want a moment of truth. Shining truth!”
“But that’s precisely what you have!” Rod exclaimed, almost fiercely. “You’ve forged this great law firm as your tool. Or, rather, as your shining sword. You say you’re not indispensable to it, but I claim you are. There’s not another firm in town with our unity, our ésprit de corps. Every one of your partners feels it is as much his club, his school, his church, I might almost say, as his business association.”
Arnold at this chose to conclude the discussion, and, anyway, the governor didn’t appoint him. But there was a kernel of truth in what Rod had said about the firm. Arnold had created a tight unit. Partners were always chosen from the associates, never brought in from the outside. There were no branch offices, even in Washington or Paris. Profits were divided evenly among the partners, varying only according to years of service. Arnold himself, it was true, received a considerably larger share as general manager, but only through the unanimous vote of the partnership, with him abstaining.
But really abstaining? Had he not known perfectly what they were up to? Had he not known that the firm was his? Had he not known that the biggest clients were all his, and that, however benevolent, however unchallenged, however assured of the united support of his nineteen cohorts, he was still a despot? And was his occasional restiveness not possibly evidence of a hidden fear that Rod Jessup was grooming himself for the successorship?
And, indeed, only a few months before the dreadful event of the flaunted adultery, came the one serious row in Arnold’s halcyon relationship with his son-in-law.
The final settlement of the estate of a rich client of Arnold’s was being held up pending the outcome of a suit brought by the widow of the caretaker of the decedent’s Long Island estate for a bequest to her late husband of $50,000, which the executors had refused to pay on the grounds that both men were drowned when their fishing boat on Long Island Sound capsized and that there was no evidence that the caretaker had survived his employer.
Rod had marched into Arnold’s office one morning and placed his determined features between his father-in-law and the breathtaking view of the harbor.
“Of course, trusts and estates are not my business, sir, but I couldn’t help hearing about the Martin case. It can’t be true that you aren’t going to pay that poor woman the legacy to her husband!”
“My dear boy,” Arnold retorted a bit testily, “that is a matter for the executors, not for counsel, to decide. And even if trusts and estates are not your field, surely you must recall from your law school days that fiduciaries need pay only what the law requires them to pay.”
“Of course, but surely the widow, who takes the residuary estate outright, as I understand it, can be advised to pay the legacy.”
“I am not in the habit of advising my clients as to their moral duties.”
“Couldn’t you break your habit? Certainly in a case as flagrant as this one?”
Arnold felt a sudden constriction around his heart. “Aren’t you being the least bit impertinent?”
Rod flushed. “I’m sorry, sir. I forgot myself.”
“I will tell you this, my lad. If it will make things any easier for you. Mrs. Martin is a bitter woman. The autopsy showed that both men had been drinking heavily. She believes that it was the caretaker who brought the whiskey along in the boat and was responsible for the disaster.”
A long pause followed, during which Rod paced the floor, evidently seeking to assess this information. At last he paused and faced Arnold. “Only one more question, sir. Do you agree with Mrs. Martin that the caretaker was responsible?”
Arnold was about to answer that he neither knew nor cared and that it was not his or his son-in-law’s business to look into the matter further, but, somewhat to his own surprise, his reply was much milder. “As a matter of fact, I don’t agree with her. Oliver Martin had been drinking for years, and it’s much more probable that the unfortunate caretaker was told to bring the booze and almost forced to drink it with his boss.”
“You won’t tell Mrs. Martin that?”
“And lose the estate? For she’s a mean one. Dream on!”
“What’s an estate to a principle?”
Arnold was about to shout at him, to call him a madman, to tell him to get out of his office, when something in the glittering eyes of the young man stopped him. He thought of him suddenly as a Blake watercolor, naked, shining, an Apollo with raised arms and golden hair. Who was this young man, anyway? What was he?
“All right, Rod. I will tell her.”
His son-in-law’s smile was radiant. “I knew you would, sir. I never doubted it. I never doubted you.”
Arnold talked to the widow Martin that evening, calling at her house at a time when he knew a cocktail would soften her jagged edges. She was nasty about the whole thing, but she agreed to pay half the legacy in a proposed settlement, and she did not fire her counsel.
It so happened that Rod left the next week for a protracted business trip, so Arnold did not have the opportunity to discuss again the Martin case with him before the explosion of the news of his brazen adultery.
So far as Arnold could recall there had never been a crisis in his life where he had been so hard put to bring the diverse elements of his wrath and consternation into any kind of coherent order. The great decisions of his life had always been made with gravity and calm. When he married, for example, he had been perfectly aware of the different motivations that had impelled him to select Eleanor Shattuck as his mate. He had weighed her modest physical attractions, her dry wit, her adequate dowry and her Boston blue blood against her diminutive stature, her biting sarcasm and her total failure to be impressed by his legal achievements. She had married him, he clearly saw and appreciated, for love alone, the constant and unarticulated love of a New England maid of ancient lineage who hadn’t a romantic bone in her body. Why, then, could he not get to the root of the fury that Rod’s betrayal aroused in him? Or was the answer that he could get to its root? His anger, he reluctantly conceded to himself, was not on behalf of his daughter or of his granddaughters or even, as he liked to think, on behalf of his firm. It was on behalf of himself alone.
Now what did this mean? Of course, he knew what it would mean to a slyly smiling, lewdly winking world. It would mean that his feeling for Rod was a homosexual obsession, and that his private image of himself as Hadrian and Rod as the beloved Antinoüs was only too exact. Yet he had never been conscious of a desire for any kind of physical intimacy with the young man; he had never even so much as patted him on the back. Of course, he had read too much not to be aware of the powers of repression that can drive such impulses even from the conscious mind, but if they are that deeply hidden, can they really be said to exist? He had preferred to see himself as an ancient Greek of the highest Socratic type whose sensual needs were satisfied by women but whose spiritual ones craved the company of idealistic younger men. He had even liked the idea, rather fancied himself in the role.
He found some consolation in talking over the problem of how to handle Rod with the only person in the office who seemed to have all its threads in hand. Harry Hammersly was almost Rod’s equal in brilliance, a seemingly confirmed bachelor and the intimate friend of both Rod and Vinnie
. His tall, straight figure, square brow and black shiny hair might have suggested a formidable virility had his air not been mitigated by a self-deprecating smile, too much hearty laughter at the jokes of others and a conversational habit of self-mockery.
Arnold had consulted Harry before accepting Rod’s resignation from the firm. He felt that the value of his son-in-law’s legal services was too great to be dispensed with on his say-so alone. But Harry had seen no alternative.
“You know what pals Rod and I have always been, so you can imagine, sir, what pain it gives me to say what I have to say. Rod will be regarded by many, perhaps by the majority of your partners, as one who has offended you beyond the scope of real forgiveness. The spirit of unity that has been your great creation in Dillard Kaye would be shattered fatally if you kept him on. And you needn’t be concerned about Rod’s future. He will find another good post soon enough. No doubt with one of our rivals.”
Arnold nodded slowly as he took this in. “And how do you think I should advise my afflicted daughter? I know she has a loyal friend in you, Harry.”
“I am proud to hear you say it, sir. I think, of course, a divorce is necessary. Your pride and hers could hardly let you consider a reconciliation under the circumstances, even if one were offered, which seems most unlikely.”
“I have to agree with that.”
“And in choosing the jurisdiction in which to sue, I see no reason to look beyond the borders of the state in which the wrong occurred.”
“You mean New York? On the grounds of adultery? Do we want a scandal greater than we already have? What are you talking about, Harry?”
“I’m talking about something we can do for Rod. Something that may help to beat him back into the senses he seems temporarily to have lost. What the psychiatrists call shock treatment. Let him see in our papers his spades called spades, his paramour named, his sin defined. Why should we smooth it all over in a Reno fantasy where we ask for a decree because he failed to respond to a two-demand bid at a bridge table? We owe it to Rod, a man we have loved and respected, to show him just how low he has sunk. And maybe that will help him get back to his feet.”
Arnold could hardly swallow. His throat was choked until he coughed several times and wiped his eyes. He recalled the day of the Armistice, in 1918, when he had been an army major on staff duty behind the front, safe from enemy fire, though not through any choice of his own, and the ecstasy he had felt at the thought of the beaten Boches, throwing down their arms and preparing to return to homes made hungry by the Allied blockade. The old song “We Bring the Jubilee!” had echoed in a heart full of righteous hate. Day of Wrath! Day of God!
“Well, Harry, there may be justice in what you say.”
Despite his exaltation, Arnold knew he would have to discuss this with his wife, which he did that very night, after dinner, when they were having their coffee in the library. She sat there, impassive, enigmatic, on the other side of the fireplace, her black beady eyes, under her pasty brow and messy auburn hair, fixed on him as he talked. She had not attracted him physically for a decade or more; her native high spirits had faded, little by little, as if they were Boston foliage bound to wither in a New York climate.
“You seem unusually Zeus-like today, my dear,” she offered at last. “When may I expect the first thunderbolt?”
He used to tell friends, more or less jocularly, that Eleanor exceeded Browning’s last duchess in that her ribald laughs rather than her smiles “went everywhere,” including in his direction, and that, had he been a Renaissance despot, he might have “given commands.” She prided herself, he knew only too well, on her contempt for social snobbery, for “pseudo-intellectualism” and for the vanities of dress and domestic elegance, but the austerity of her absolute faith in the essential moral Tightness of her Shattuck and Lowell ancestors made something of a desert of whatever bright colors and excitements Manhattan and Glenville had to offer. The air of the desert, however, was clear and dry. For if her Beacon Street ancestors had lifted her above the strife of Fifth and Park Avenue social climbers, so had her transcendental ones (she had Emerson blood as well) freed her from the clutch of religious creeds. Eleanor, on the ramparts of the Colony Club, brandished her weapons alone.
Somewhat gruffly, Arnold summarized his discussion with Hammersly.
“Harry recommends a New York divorce?” she queried. “And we thought him and Rodman such pals.”
“He’s thinking of Vinnie. Why should the poor child have to take herself to some godless western state and swear falsely that she resides in it, when our own legislature in Albany has provided the just and effective remedy for the wrong she has received?”
“Why? To avoid a stinking scandal; that’s why.”
“The scandal is already here. Our son-in-law has seen to that!”
“But you’d make it worse. And don’t talk to me about false swearing. Your firm has sent plenty of clients to Reno, including your niece, who had the same grounds of complaint as Vinnie.”
“That was different.”
“It was different in that you had no particular resentment against her husband. You just wanted to get rid of him; that was all. And she had another fool ready to marry her.”
“Which is hardly Vinnie’s case.”
“What do you really know about Vinnie’s case? What’s got you worked up is Rod. I’ve never seen you so violent.”
“And what about you?” he demanded, raising his voice to take the offensive. “Wouldn’t a little violence become a mother whose daughter has been so foully treated? But no, you must always be the priestess of the life of reason. I daresay you think Rodman is behaving only as most men would, given half a chance. Isn’t that part of your blind faith in cynicism? It’s a great way, I suppose, of avoiding upsetting emotions.”
Eleanor cut through his reproaches to make a single point. “I don’t think Rod is behaving at all like other men. He’s basically a puritan. Maybe it takes a Bostonian to see that.”
“Well, he’s certainly not acting like a puritan.”
“But maybe he’s reacting like one. A puritan turned inside out.”
“A puritan gone to the devil, you mean?”
“That could be it. Maybe he hasn’t learned that if God is dead, the devil must be, too.”
“Which is taking us a long way from choosing a forum for the divorce.”
“Oh, if you’re going to get it, I don’t really care where. And I suppose the divorce is inevitable. You don’t hear much these days of reconciliations. The first thing that goes wrong in a marriage, and, bang, call the lawyer. And after that it’s hopeless.”
“The bar has always had your good opinion, my dear.”
It had been easy to predict that Eleanor’s reaction to the proposed method of divorce would irritate him, but Vinnie’s came as a surprise to her father. She seemed upset, nervous, fidgety, during their conference in his office, where they met to emphasize the gravity of what he proposed. Twice she rose and strode to the window to contemplate the view. He thought she looked less pretty than usual, and he hated this, for her looks were always important to him. The big blond girl with the laughing blue eyes and cheerful smile had become plumper with the years, not enough to make her in the least unattractive but enough to take her out of the category of beauties in which he had once so proudly placed her. Arnold could not understand why his motherly old secretary, Mrs. Peck, insisted that her added pounds had made her rounder and “sexier.”
She uttered a little cry of dismay when he came to the point about the New York divorce.
“You side with Harry, then?”
“I most certainly do.”
“Well, if both of you agree, what can I do but go along? I know Mummy’s against it, but then Mummy’s always basically neutral, and she doesn’t really care. I’ve been brought up all my life to think of Dillard Kaye as something that couldn’t be wrong. As a kind of holy tribunal. Or King Arthur’s round table. Where all the knights were perfect gentlemen
and invincible fighters. And Rod as Lancelot. And now look what’s happening. Lancelot is being thrown out of Camelot!”
“Not for an affair with King Arthur’s wife!” Arnold couldn’t help interjecting.
“Not with Mummy, hardly!” Here Vinnie broke into a kind of gasping laughter that shocked her father. Had she been drinking? At ten o’clock in the morning? “No, he’s more like Satan than Lancelot, isn’t he? So he must be cast out of heaven, down, down, down…” She leaned over and stared at the floor.
“So there we are, my dear,” Arnold murmured in a softer tone, beginning to be alarmed at her uncharacteristic mood.
“Well, I guess I must do as I’m told, Daddy. One rebellion in Dillard Kaye is surely enough for one year.”
“Vinnie! You’re beginning to sound like your mother.”
***
Her father, at least until her marriage, and arguably even afterward, had been the principal figure in Vinnie’s life, and she presumably in his. He had made little secret of his preference for his oldest, prettiest and brightest daughter over the other three, which the latter had accepted, almost without jealousy, as a fact of life, evident from their earliest days and also as a matter not of the first importance. The overworked and constantly absent American father of the nineteen twenties and thirties was not the primary figure of the home, and the younger Dillards turned for the permission needed for their various pleasures to the actual ruler of the household, Mummy. And Eleanor Dillard tended to regard her eldest daughter’s total dependence on her father as something of a welcome relief, as if the latter were reducing her parental burdens from four to three. Which did not keep her, however, from being sarcastic about their relationship, describing it to her cronies as a Victorian pastel of the benevolent aging sire stroking the golden hair of the lovely child whose eyes are fixed adoringly on his. Couldn’t one see it as the ultimately idealized union of the sexes, with the male providing wisdom and strength and loving protection while the female furnished an absolute loyalty and a purity of body and mind? Union of the sexes? No! Abolition of sex! Wasn’t that what a true civilization required?
Manhattan Monologues Page 17
