“No, I’m an untouchable,” he said gruffly. “I’m in real estate.”
“But that must be interesting, too. Or at least basic.”
“As interesting as anything else, I guess.”
“That doesn’t sound as if you had a very high opinion of the law.” He shrugged. “It’s a living. If it was too much fun, people wouldn’t pay you to do it.”
Miss Tilney looked at him more closely. She was a very serious girl. “But Daddy loves his work.”
“I daresay. But he’s on top of the heap.”
“It’s not a question of his being on top, Mr. Reilley. It’s a question of his caring about his profession.”
“I beg your pardon, Miss Tilney. It’s a question of his having hired help to take care of the boring details.”
“I never heard anything so cynical,” she exclaimed, obviously shocked. “In a learned profession none of the details should be boring.”
“But they are. Writing up all that small print so the client can get out of a bad bargain.” Harry paused, marveling that the urge to be unpleasant at the expense of his superiors could be stronger than the urge to make friends with a beautiful girl. “Your father’s a very clever man, you know. He knows he has to idealize the law for the benefit of all those young men who follow him around like faithful hounds. If he didn’t make them feel like Jesuit missionaries, they wouldn’t be happy, and if they weren’t happy, they wouldn’t work so well.”
It was clear that no such heresy had been talked in the Tilney house before. “You mean Daddy says things he doesn’t mean?”
“Let’s put it that he counts on different interpretations at different levels.”
“Of which mine must be the lowest!”
He saw that he was making her really angry and bitterly regretted his course. But it seemed like a one-way street; he had to go to the end to turn around. “You’re not a lawyer,” he tried to explain. “But your dad certainly knows that the greater part of securities work is jamming as many ads into a prospectus as one can slip under the nose of the Securities Exchange Commission.”
“I think you’ll find the facts to be otherwise if you take the trouble to look into them,” she said in a chilling tone. “My father cares passionately that only the exact truth be stated in his prospectuses.”
“What is truth? Pilate asked.”
“I really can’t understand, if you feel that way, why you work for Tower, Tilney at all.”
“I told you, it’s a living.”
“Surely there must be an easier one.”
“Let me know if you hear of it.”
She turned away abruptly to the man on her other side, and Harry was graced with her back for the rest of the meal. After dinner, too, she avoided him, and it was only when he was leaving and had the excuse to bid her goodnight that there was an opportunity for further interchange.
“I guess you only talk to green goods. The poor ‘basic’ real estate man has hardly had a word with you all evening.”
“It’s not that at all, Mr. Reilley. I haven’t talked to you because it seemed to me you had such a poor opinion of us all.”
“Of you all? Not of you, surely.”
“Oh, I don’t pretend to set myself apart.”
Something tore now in his heart at the stupidity of it. Particularly when he sensed, in the very tensity of her anger, that she, too, was aware of something in the atmosphere between them. “Look, Miss Tilney. No, let me call you Fran. I’ve been an awful ass tonight, saying a lot of things I didn’t mean at all. Playing the cheap cynic. The only thing I really wanted to tell you was what a beautiful, bright girl I think you are. Give me another chance, will you? Let me take you out to dinner some night. Any night you say. I’d like to show you I’m not a complete hick.” They were standing alone, by the door to the living room, and she was staring at him with intent, startled eyes. “How about it? Tuesday night?” She still said nothing. “Are you too mad at me? Or are you engaged to be married, or something like that?”
“No, nothing like that,” she said at last and laughed flatly. “I’ll be glad to go out with you on Tuesday, Mr. Reilley. Harry, I mean.”
He had to walk home that night to work off his excitement. What he marveled at most, as he looked back over the evening, was the miracle of his own apology at the last moment. If she had gone to bed early, if she had slipped out of the house for a later engagement, or if she had even been standing with her father when he came up to bid her goodnight, all would have been lost. She would have gone out of his life forever. It would have been simply another closed chapter in the long wasteful history of his truculence. Never before could he remember having experienced so sudden an attraction. He had not even dared to shake her hand in leaving. And she had been glad he hadn’t, too. Oh, yes. She had felt some of the same pull. It was a pity that she should be quite so identified with her father’s firm, but that was something he could not help. The whole evening, for that matter, was showing signs of developing into something that he could not help. And where, after all, had helping things got him?
She was waiting in the front hall when he called on Tuesday night. Not for her was the pose at the piano, the startled look at the clock, the “Good heavens, is it seven already?” She tucked her arm under his as they went down the steep stoop and suggested an Italian restaurant on Third Avenue.
“I see you have my pocketbook in mind,” he said as they got into a taxi.
“Well, I hate to see a lot of money spent on ravioli. And ravioli is what I’ve been looking forward to all day.”
Harry reflected that to some men her abruptness in taking the lead might have been slightly offensive. But he felt no need to assert himself in the matter of the choice of restaurants. As he watched her, he saw her shoulders twitch, in a sudden involuntary spasm. Was she afraid of what she was doing, afraid of going out with him? Because he wasn’t the right type of young man? He wondered if she had told her father.
At the restaurant he ordered a cocktail and she a glass of Dubonnet. She ordered it with the promptness of a habitual nondrinker who knows that a man likes her to have something in her hand. He guessed that she would not finish it, which turned out to be correct. He guessed later that she would drink one glass of red wine with her ravioli, and this, too, turned out to be right.
“I behaved very badly at your family’s the other night,” he apologized again. “When I’m faced with people whom I basically admire, or even envy, like your father, I have a tendency to revert to the nasty little boy I once was. I try to tear them down. My father went to jail when I was fourteen, and I suppose a psychiatrist would say that I can’t admit that anyone else’s could be any better.”
He watched her carefully as he said this to see if she would set her face in the mask of the young lady determined to show that she can’t be shocked. But she was quite natural. “Your father went to jail! How perfectly horrible for you.”
“It wasn’t fun.”
“What had he done? Or what did they say he’d done? Or would you rather not talk about it?”
“No, I was the one who brought it up. Of course I’ll talk about it. My dad was guilty of the dullest of crimes. He was caught with his hand in the company till. And it wasn’t to get money for his wife and kiddies, either. It was for more exotic pleasures.”
“Poor man, I hope he enjoyed them.”
“Don’t feel too sorry for him. He felt sorry enough for himself. In fact, he died of self-pity. Not to mention the unkind cracks of his youngest born.”
“Was that you? You mustn’t mind. We always exaggerate our meanness to the dead.”
“Not I,” Harry retorted with a bitter laugh. “I won’t horrify you by giving particulars.”
She was too wise to insist. “When I hear about other people’s hard lives, I realize how easy my own has been,” she said ruefully. “I’ve been very spoiled. Or blessed, as they call it.”
“My life hasn’t really been hard. But I was banking on your
thinking it was. I figured, if I shot off my mouth about my old man, you’d forgive me for being such a crumb the other night.”
“You don’t mean you made it all up?”
“Oh, no, it’s true enough,” he reassured her, smiling at her instant spurt of indignation. “God knows, it’s true enough. My father was always sentimental about ideals. That’s what made me distrust them.”
“Daddy’s not unlike you, you know. He has his black moods, too. The days when he describes Tower, Tilney & Webb as ‘Shyster, Beagle and Shyster.’”
“As what?”
“It was the name of the law firm in an old Marx Brothers comedy. Mother can always tell Daddy’s mood by the sound of his step in the hall. If she looks up from her needlepoint when he comes in and asks: ‘How’s Shyster, Beagle and Shyster?’ then I know it’s one of those days.”
“You make your old man sound almost human.”
“Oh, Daddy’s the most human person in the world! You’d love him, Harry, if you got to know him.”
Harry smiled at the incongruity of such a verb to describe any potential relationship between himself and the senior partner. “Of course, he asked me to dinner,” he allowed. “I owe him a lot for that, no matter how snooty his green goods boys are.”
“Are they snooty?”
“Well, I think they are,” Harry said with a shrug. “But maybe it’s just because I’m not one of them. Does your father know you’re out with me tonight?”
She looked away. “I didn’t tell him.”
“Why not?”
“Because I don’t tell Daddy everything I’m doing,” she retorted with an edge of irritation. “Why should I?”
“Not because he’d hate to have his daughter going out with a mick?”
“Oh, Harry!”
“I’m serious. Do you know that I have a brother who’s a priest? And two first cousins who are nuns? How would that sit in his Presbyterian soul?”
“My father is above religious prejudice,” Fran said with dignity. “Besides, he’d never have asked you to the house if he’d objected to our being friends.”
“Oh, so that’s it. You wouldn’t have gone out with me if I hadn’t been asked to the house?”
“Really, you’re too ridiculous. I wouldn’t have known you if you hadn’t been asked to the house. But if you can’t get that log off your shoulder, I’m going to take myself straight home.”
“No, no, Fran, please don’t do that. I promise to be good.” He took her hand calmly and folded it in both of his, but, although obviously surprised, she made no motion to pull it away. “Don’t worry about the church. I haven’t been to mass in a year. Only you probably mind that even more. All right, I’ll go. Next Sunday. Or with you to your church.”
“I don’t know where you got the notion that either I or Daddy are such bugs on religion. Honestly, I don’t care if you’re a Moslem.”
“Be careful now or I’ll be shocked. That’s the way with bad Catholics. We want all you Protestants to be good as gold.”
It was now apparent that they were going to be the best of friends. There had been talk in the taxi of a movie, but they went instead to a bar where they sat in a booth and she drank gingerale while he drank beer. He talked an outrageous amount about himself, even working in the Korean war and the wound in his leg. She listened perfectly, but she talked, too. For the Korean war he had to hear about the girls in her Shakespeare class at Miss Irvin’s. It was all very fair. In the taxi afterwards, as they drew up at her door, he kissed her. It was a very light and gentle kiss, and like the Dubonnet there was only one of them, but he did not press her for a second. He had made enough botches for one lifetime. Something had intervened in his destiny, and he was learning to be wise enough to give it a free hand.
2
Lee Ozite, “Ozey,” as he was known to all, received a tense, minute-to-minute satisfaction, during the working hours of the day, in his merited reputation for efficiency. “Have you asked Ozey about that?” or “Has anyone put Ozey on the job?” was the first question a partner would ask when brought to a halt by any kind of procedural snag. As managing clerk it was his duty to see that the court calendars were answered, the papers served on time and the litigators notified of their dates for oral argument, but his jurisdiction, spurred by his own eagerness, had spread to cover traffic tickets, tips to court clerks, detectives in morals cases, any field, in fact, where the right word to the right person could solve the difficulties of the individual in conflict with the minor officers of organized society. To assist him he had three night law students who worked a six-hour day running his errands over the city and calling in every hour, when he would give them a further task or else cry: “Head in!” in the bark of an operations officer sitting over a map. It made for a busy and satisfying day, but sometimes during the long evenings in Queens, where he lived in an apartment with his old mother and aunt, he would suffer doubts about his position in the office. Were the jocular compliments of the partners sincerely meant? Or was he just poor old Ozey with his panting law students and his ringing telephones? Like a mouse on a treadwheel?
At such moments he would become absolutely still except for his almond eyes, which moved furtively from side to side. His aunt would glance up from her detective story and comment that he was looking like a Buddha again. And Miss Ozite was right; there was something synthetically Oriental about her nephew, something of Charlie Chan, something grinning and hand rubbing and faintly sinister. Fortunately, at just the right moment, somebody always laughed, and Ozey laughed with them.
“But someday I won’t,” he would tell himself grimly. “Someday I’ll have the last laugh.”
His fear of being laughed at had a natural counterpart in his fear of being unattractive to women. He realized, intellectually, that this fear was a foolish one. Ozey was bald on the top of his head and inclined to be fleshy, but his round head and face and firm, well-formed features went well with baldness, and his extra weight was evenly distributed over a short but muscular body. He liked to think of himself as the bald, sexually potent Siamese monarch in The King and I. But he could never get over the apprehension that women, particularly “ladies,” would find him somehow unpalatable, perhaps, dreadful thought, even “greasy,” and his sexual experiences—up to his present and thirty-sixth year—had all been purchased.
But Ozey had one great hope, and that was marriage. He knew that women were more interested in marriage than in anything else and that they gave even unlikely proposals their most serious consideration. Ozey felt that allied to a handsome, good-tempered woman of size—he always pictured her as larger than himself—he would be surer of the respect of the world that he had to face. He had another vision of Lee Ozite, again as the Siamese potentate but this time drawn in fiercer lines, a touch of Tamburlaine added, leading a large white naked Christian slave girl by a slender cord about her neck. Of course he would be nice to her, very nice to her. And the more he entertained this vision, the more he saw Doris Marsh in the role of the docile captive.
In real life, however, and as a tax associate, she ranked the managing clerk, and he would never forget her cool, justified reproach when one of his boys had filed a tax return at the wrong bureau. Yet on all other occasions she had been perfectly friendly, perfectly democratic. Unlike some of the associates, she gave herself no airs and would linger in his office after checking the calendar for a few minutes of chat and jokes. When she leaned over his desk to read the law journal that was always spread out there, the proximity of her breasts and the sound of her breathing excited him uncomfortably. She was just the height of his Christian slave and had the same white soft skin. He would have preferred blond hair to black and gray, but, after all, the real world could never match fantasy. Was she aware of the effect upon him? Was she tantalizing him? When he had asked her once to lunch, she had agreed readily enough, and they had had a pleasant hour of shop talk, but when he had tried to push away the money that she handed him for the check, she had
simply laughed and said: “Come now, Ozey. This isn’t a date.”
Did she mean she wouldn’t have had one with him? Ozey brooded furiously all that afternoon. But when he left the office, she happened to be going down in the same elevator and told him: “I enjoyed our lunch, Ozey. Do you realize not one of the other lawyers except Harry Reilley has ever asked me? You might think I was some kind of pariah.” Ozey was too thrilled to sit, in the subway, and all the way home he hung on a strap in a half-empty car, calculating the wisdom of a sudden proposal. She would be startled, to be sure. It might be fun to see just how startled she would be. There would be something titillating about marching into her office and suggesting the most intimate of relationships without a single preliminary. Right there and then, before the set of Prentice-Hall tax services and before she had had time to take off her glasses. Could she afford to turn him down? Shrewdly, rather meanly, he assessed her. She was near thirty; she would never be a partner; she was an orphan of obscure origin. Yet as Mrs. Ozite all these liabilities would immediately become assets. She would not be too much younger than her husband or too much more successful a lawyer, and she would bring no tiresome in-laws. Besides, since she was a professional woman, his mother and aunt were bound to dislike her, which would make the inevitable break with his own family a cleaner, neater thing.
If Ozey, however, was precipitate in his thinking, he was cautious in his actions, and it was a good two months from the day of their lunch to the day of his decision to ask her for a date. But as he stood in the doorway of her office with a sheepish smile, the question fluttering about his lips, she anticipated him.
“Ozey! I was just coming to see you.”
“Well, that’s nice.”
“Can you lunch with me? Or rather on me. I want to take you out and buy you a cocktail and pick your brains. It’s a personal matter.”
He grinned broadly. “You mean a date?”
“Would it were anything so pleasant.” She frowned and shook her head. “The fact of the matter, Ozey, is that I’m in a bit of trouble, and I need your advice.”
The Collected Stories of Louis Auchincloss Page 11
