Chambers Todd was the last speaker and discussed a committee of the City Bar Association of which he was chairman and whose other members he was trying to persuade to recommend to the State Legislature the abolition of an excise tax that was particularly onerous to a trucking client. There was nothing in the subject to distract Tilney from his speculations on the effect of Harry’s defection. Would it kill Fran, as sometimes happened in Victorian novels? Would she droop and pine away? Or would she master her sorrow and never show it, but remain for the rest of her days a bright, brittle, useful, dryly smiling old maid, a sacrifice to her father’s prejudice? Tilney suddenly leaned forward and put both hands over his face, and Waldron Webb whispered in his ear: “Are you all right, Clitus?”
“Oh, yes, yes.”
The speeches were over, and he rose to indicate that the meeting was adjourned. As he lingered to light a cigar and to let the firm file out of the doorway, he saw Harry Reilley walk over to Todd. What followed he could not help but overhear as both men had carrying voices.
“May I ask you a question, Mr. Todd?”
“Go right ahead, my dear fellow.” Todd was mellow with the evening’s whiskey and the sense of a successful address.
“In your speech tonight you spoke of using your position on a bar association committee in favor of a client. Isn’t it the duty of committee members to render unbiased opinions on behalf of the association?”
Todd’s heavy features congealed as he took in the unexpected attack. “You speak like a first-year law student,” he said curtly. “If you ever have the good fortune to secure a big company as a client, you will learn that the word ‘unbiased’ has no further meaning for you. A good lawyer doesn’t forget his clients when he closes his shop. A good lawyer eats, lives and breathes for his clients. A good lawyer represents his clients even in his sleep!”
Harry laughed unpleasantly. “I had been wondering what the difference was between your kind of lawyer and a lobbyist. Now I see there’s none!”
Tilney stepped forward to touch the young man on the arm. “I want to talk to you, Harry.” He turned abruptly and walked to a corner to get away from the now livid Todd. “I can’t let you commit suicide like that,” he continued. “Come back to my house and have a drink with me.”
“Won’t Fran be there?”
“I don’t know. It doesn’t matter.”
Harry stared. “You mean the ban’s off?”
“Must you tie me down? I mean I won’t fight you anymore.”
The glitter in the young man’s eyes went far to convince Tilney that he had done the right thing. “She’ll be sore as hell I haven’t called her.”
“Tell her you were out of town. Invent a business trip. I’ll back you up. That’s easy. The guy who has the really tough job is the guy who’s going to have to save your neck from Chambers Todd. And that guy is me!”
In the taxi Tilney tried to reduce some of the constraint between them by reverting to Harry’s interchange with Todd. “Actually, I agree with what you said. I wish we could return to the old days of greater integrity. When a lawyer could argue one interpretation of a statute in the morning and its opposite in the afternoon. Before we were captured by the corporations. Before we became simple mouthpieces.”
“It doesn’t worry me as much as I made it appear,” Harry replied with a candid laugh. “I’m used to politicians in my family. My old man knew so many. What I can’t stand is sanctimoniousness. And your partner, Mr. Todd, is sanctimonious.”
Tilney wondered if he shouldn’t object to such familiarity. “You don’t like Mr. Todd?”
“I don’t like any of them, to tell the truth, Mr. Tilney. Except yourself. I’ve just about decided that your firm is not the place for me.”
“Well, don’t let’s make the decision tonight,” Tilney said hastily. “If you and I get along, it’s always possible to work something out. The partners aren’t all Chambers Todds. Wait till you know them better.”
“It’s up to you, sir. If you say stay, I’ll stay.” He laughed again. “I guess it’s pretty clear that I want to see Fran.”
Tilney had figured out that Ada would wait up for him on the chance that he might have learned something about Harry, and he was correct. Yet with her usual control she did not manifest the least surprise at seeing his companion. When Fran came in from the library, where she had been correcting homework, she was equally impassive.
“Good evening, Mr. Reilley.”
Harry got up and took her by the hands. “I’m sorry, Fran. I was sent up to Boston on a rush closing. I haven’t had a minute.”
“Not even to telephone?”
“You know how things are. Ask your father.”
Fran looked around at her father and then shook her head dubiously. “You both look so foxy. What have you been up to? Sometimes I think I hate lawyers.”
“Perhaps you should get them a drink, Fran,” her mother suggested. “I think it’s the last thing either of them needs.”
But when she turned to go to the dining room, Tilney knew that the damage had already been repaired. It was only the tiniest shadow on the sky of his relief that Harry should have lied so convincingly. There were things about that young man that he was obviously never going to understand. But, as Ada would have said, he was not going to marry him. There had to be a point where he stopped playing senior partner at home.
4
In the large square room decorated with light blue wallpaper and French travel posters showing the chateaux of the Loire Valley, Fran stood by a window, gazing down at the East River, while her class of tenth graders wrote their ten-minute theme on Cymbeline. In her mind she was writing a theme of her own, for she had to do something to keep within bounds the agitation of her happiness. Her theme was about the heroines of the romantic comedies, Imogen, Helena, Portia, Rosalind, those noble, radiant, resourceful women, so finely intelligent, so pure and yet so gay, so graceful in men’s clothing and yet so innately feminine, who come to us somehow embellished even by the fulsome encomiums of Victorian admirers, somehow in the images of tall, golden-toned actresses on old postcards. She was too happy to be in the least ashamed of her own exuberant conceit in likening herself to them.
“Miss Tilney?”
“Yes, Gretchen.” Gretchen Kay was always the first to ask a question after the theme. She was the serious girl of the class, nervous, dark and disliked by the others.
“Wasn’t it very bad of Posthumus to make a wager on Imogen’s virtue? And then to let her be tested?”
“Very bad.”
“And to want to kill her afterwards?”
“No, I don’t think that was as bad,” Fran answered, turning from the window. “After all, he thought her faithless.”
“Yes, but even if she had been, was that a reason for killing her?”
“Perhaps.” Fran shrugged lightly. “In those days. People were more violent then.”
“Would it have been all right for her to kill him if he’d been faithless?”
“Oh, no.” Fran was very sure about this. “That would have been altogether different. None of the comedy heroines have men who are worthy of them. Except perhaps Rosalind. Bassanio was after Portia’s money, and Bertram had to be trapped into loving Helena. And Posthumus—well, we’ve seen how he behaved. But I sometimes think the goodness of the heroines depends on their having to put up with such things. If the men were as good as the women, wouldn’t the women seem a bit dull?”
“Do you think that’s true in real life, Miss Tilney? Is it better for a girl to go with a boy who’s mercenary or faithless or unkind?”
The other girls laughed mockingly, but Fran did not join them. “It may be, Gretchen,” she said gravely. “It may indeed.”
She was troubled for the rest of the morning, as well as surprised, by her own ready acceptance of what had seemed at first the idlest of speculations. She was afraid that she had been disloyal to Harry. While none of the girls in her class knew that she was engage
d, they would find out in two weeks’ time when it was announced. And then would they speculate that he was a Posthumus or a Bertram or a Bassanio? It made matters worse that Harry in the three months following the night of the office dinner had been the gentlest, the most considerate of lovers. Lovers, she noted mentally, as if one of the girls might read her thoughts, in the Shakespearean sense. Why then did she want to represent him as someone hard or callous? Was it part of his appeal that he had seemed so on the night of their first meeting? Was she so debased that she wanted a man who, as Gretchen might have put it, would “kick her around”? Or would she all her life be a schoolgirl who wanted to play Imogen, or rather who wanted to play Ellen Terry playing Imogen?
Her mood darkened as the day progressed, and by the time school was out, she was deeply depressed. She had dreaded to face the real origin of her trouble, but at home in her room, looking at her own startled eyes in the mirror, she made herself do so. Had not Harry, in a single quarter of a year, become rather too much what her father had set out to make him? He worked in green goods now, along with Jake Platt and Bart French and the other “disciples,” and he seemed to be thoroughly content. Certainly, her father did not share her misgivings—if “misgivings” was not too strong a word. He was even demonstrative in his pleasure at how Harry had “taken hold” and hinted to Fran that he might still—despite the unhappy scene with Todd—have a future in the firm. Was it all too early? Did she respect less the more conservative Harry, in darker suits with darker ties, in white shirts only now, who tried to get on with Bart and laughed so roundly at her father’s jokes? How contemptible of her!
That evening her father telephoned to say he was bringing Bart and Harry and Jake Platt home for supper and that they were going to work in the library afterwards. It was a primary rule in the household that he could always do this. Ada would be ready, at an hour’s notice, to supply hot soup and beans and cold cuts, salad and beer to any number of young men from the office. It was the only way, at times, that she could get her husband home. She always invited the wives, too, if they could leave their children, and the ladies could play cards or knit and chat during the long evening.
They had a buffet supper that night, and Fran sat in a corner of the dining room with her brother-in-law, Bart, watching Harry, who was talking to her sister across the room. She could see that he was trying to make a good impression by the rather dainty way that he held his fork in scooping up the last of his beans. She despised herself for noticing this. After all, he didn’t really hold his fork any more daintily than the others. It was simply that he held it more daintily than he had used to. Daintily! The very word was a dye strong enough to discolor the image of any man. She had to watch herself.
“Harry fits right into the groove now, doesn’t he?”
There was no mistaking the antagonism in Bart’s tone, and Fran turned to him in surprise. Bart was so rarely antagonistic. “What groove?”
“That of the smooth young associate of Tower, Tilney.”
“The Bart French?” she asked crisply.
“If you will.” He shrugged. “It doesn’t seem so very long ago that he was telling off partners at firm dinners and wearing silver ties with green bubbles on them.”
Fran found that she was trembling all over and knew that it was less because Bart had remembered that tie than because she remembered it herself. “You don’t like him, do you?” she asked softly.
“No,” he answered with a strained little smile that did not in the least disguise his awareness that they were having a very important discussion. “And I guess it’s about the last chance I’ll have to tell you so. I should have done it earlier, but you’ve moved so fast.”
“That’s all right, Bart. Tell me why you don’t like Harry.”
“I hate people who say somebody’s not their type. Okay, I hate myself. Harry’s not my type. Or yours either.”
“I guess I’m the best judge of that.”
He shook his head. “The worst. A girl in love is the very worst. But anyone in Tower, Tilney can tell you about Harry. He’s the guy who was the great rebel until he found it was worth his while to make sheep’s eyes at the senior partner’s daughter.”
Fran closed her eyes for a moment. “Thank you, Bart,” she half whispered. “I know it wasn’t easy for you to say that.”
“It wasn’t. And the ridiculous thing is I’m not even sure that I want to influence you.” Bart’s long face was strangely alive with his perplexity. “I just thought you ought to know.”
“I think I ought. And I assure you that it will not influence me.” She even managed to smile now at her brother-in-law. “But go and talk to someone else for a bit, Bart. One may appreciate candor, but it’s impossible not to resent the candid. For a day or so, at least. Don’t worry. It won’t last forever.”
Fran went to her room after supper, on the excuse of correcting school papers, and sat alone in the dark to hug her misery. What an absurdly fragile thing happiness was! When she thought of how she had felt only that morning! Yet as small a thing as the memory of an ugly tie—no, more than that, a vulgar tie—was enough to blow away all the shining cobwebs of her good humor and leave her alone in as drab a mental chamber as was ever occupied by Bart French. It might have been a judgment for the hubris of likening herself to Imogen and Helena. It was not easy to imagine them being distressed by a lover’s way of holding a fork or by a silly tie. They were not petty snobs. Middle-class snobs. There was at least the expiation of knowing that she could make up for a part of her meanness by being a good wife to Harry. But happiness, where was happiness?
When she answered the knock at her door and saw Harry, she suddenly threw her arms around his neck. “Oh, darling, how wonderful! Are you through already?”
“The boss broke up school early tonight. Come on, I’m taking you out for a drink.”
At the Third Avenue bar where they had gone on their first evening together he stared a moment into his beer and then looked up at her with an embarrassed smile. “I have something to tell you. Something about myself. Unless your father’s already told you.”
“Daddy knows? It can’t be so bad, then.”
She listened in fascinated silence as he told her, in brief, bleak sentences, without embellishment or apology, the story of his affair with Doris Marsh. At first she found herself thinking of Imogen again and the hero whose defects threw into greater relief the virtues of the heroine. The she found herself thinking that Bart French could never have done such a thing. That at least he would have paid the doctor’s full bill. And all the while, from a wonderful shivering within, she knew that the full glow of her morning ecstasy had been restored.
“Has she really married Mr. Ozite?” she asked when he had finished.
“Oh, yes. Weeks ago.”
“Perhaps you should give her the other five hundred as a wedding present.”
He saw in her eyes that his cause was undamaged, perhaps even curiously enhanced, and he laughed. “Is that all you have to say? I sometimes think women have no morals.”
“Not where other women are concerned, anyway.” She cleared her throat with a little cough. “And now I have something to tell you. Something much worse.” When she saw the hard, bright instant gleam of alarm in his eyes, she added quickly: “Oh, not what you’re thinking. It’s not about another man. It’s about you. I was criticizing you in my mind tonight. For seeming too much like Bart and Jake.”
He looked confused. “But how?”
“By being too much the smooth young Tower, Tilney associate.”
“You mean a toady?”
“Oh, no. It was just that you seemed less like Harry Reilley.”
“And now I’m old Harry again? Because I’m the hero of a dirty story?”
She laughed at the absurdity of it. “I guess so. That’s the kind of illogical thing a woman is.”
But Harry was not in the least amused. He was suddenly very angry, and two bright red spots appeared just under his
cheekbones. “It gave you a thrill that I wasn’t a gentleman, is that it? You only cared about the mick? You don’t want me in the same dancing class with Bart French—I look too pathetic in those silk tights and black pumps? Is that it?”
“Oh, Harry,” she whispered, appalled.
“Do you think I give a goddamn about those precious little disciples of your father? Do you think I give a goddamn about his sacred firm? Do you know that I was going to resign the day he asked me for dinner? Every case I’ve worked on since then, every shirt and tie I’ve bought, every drink I’ve passed up, every snotty partner I haven’t told off, has been because of you. And what a sweet ass that makes me! When all you wanted was a tough mick to give you a black eye!”
In the suffocation of her shame Fran felt a sudden terror that he would leave the bar and walk out of her life before she had found her voice. “Oh, my darling,” she gasped, “forgive me!”
His anger faded to exasperation as he looked into her desperately pleading eyes. “Well, you needn’t make a soap opera of it.”
“I love you, darling!” She reached across the table to seize his hand. “Does anything else matter?”
“For Pete’s sake, Fran!”
“No, listen to me, Harry. Please. It’s only fair to give me a chance to explain. You see, I’ve always had a fetish about the office. Because it was Daddy’s world, that shining man’s world that I could never get into. And then when you came along, and without even caring about it, without in the least admiring it, made it yours, I began to wonder if it could have been so great a world, after all. And because that idea was painful to me, I had to accuse you of conquering it unfairly!”
“I haven’t conquered it yet. By a long shot.”
“But you will! I know you will. And all the while I should have been telling myself that it’s not because Daddy’s world was weak but because you were strong!”
The Collected Stories of Louis Auchincloss Page 13
