Diary of a Yuppie

by Louis Auchincloss

  “Like Benchley’s remedy for the urge to take exercise, I lie down till the feeling goes away. How many times do I have to tell you that you can’t indulge your personal feelings till you get to the top of the heap?”

  “Maybe I won’t want to then.”

  “Maybe not. That’s the chance you take.”

  “I’m sorry, Sylvia. I guess I was too tired to go out tonight. I had a bad day at the office.”

  “Mr. Burley again?”

  “How did you guess?”

  “Because I’m getting to know you, dear, like a book.” We had reached her house. “Come up for a drink and tell me about it. Just one drink and just that. We’re both tired.”

  She listened to me in her still, attentive way as I related the iniquities of Oz Burley. I knew that she didn’t in the least comprehend why it was so important to me to run my firm as I wanted to run it. To her the law was just another business, as Burley would have put it, and couldn’t businesses be run in a variety of ways? But she was always practical in facing what she had to cope with, even when it bordered on the irrational.

  “I guess you’d better get rid of that young man, and I think I know how to do it. Lose him. In a firm three times your size, would you even notice him?”

  “Maybe not, but how do I do that? Are you suggesting a merger?”

  “Not I. But Ethelinda’s lawyer, Gil Arnheim, is. At least he’s been sounding me out. He’s beginning to think you’re the hottest thing in town. I expect he’d like to grab you while you’re still within his range. And, of course, he’d rather join us than fight us over Ethelinda.”

  I could hardly breathe, as happened to me at moments when my career was suddenly at stake. But my mind, as always at such moments, was cold and clear. I watched her closely.

  “Does he want me or my firm?”

  “He wants you, but he might take your firm to get you. Would it matter if Mr. Burley got left out in the crunch?”

  “No.” Nor would it. It wouldn’t even matter if Mr. Burley got left in. He became irrelevant. Arnheim & Buttrick was twice our size; joined, we would be one of the major firms of the city. They had big litigation and estates departments, just the fields in which we were weak. The fit was made in heaven! That is, if heaven had anything to do with a man like Gilbert Arnheim. I murmured a silent vow that one of my conditions would be that the new firm should be called Arnheim, Buttrick & Service.

  “I think some of my partners might balk at being swallowed up by Gil Arnheim.”

  “Even if they knew they’d be warm and cozy in his belly?”

  “Well, he has a certain reputation. His firm is supposed to be sharp.”

  “I thought a lawyer couldn’t be too sharp.”

  “There are degrees. They’re about the limit.”

  “You mean they’re crooks?”

  “No, no, I don’t go that far.”

  “I hardly think Ethelinda would retain a firm of shysters.”

  “Well, let’s put it that Ethelinda likes to win.”

  “I guess I don’t follow you, Bob. You tell me that you’re always within the law, just within. You rather brag about it. Isn’t that what Gil Arnheim is?”

  I considered this. I didn’t quite like being bracketed with Arnheim. But wasn’t I proposing to make the bracket a real one? I changed the subject.

  “If this goes through you ought to get a fat commission. What a wheeler-dealer you are, Sylvia!”

  “Oh, don’t worry about me. I can look after my compensation. And now that you’ve finished that drink, my dear, good night.”

  16

  GILBERT ARNHEIM and I had a couple of exploratory lunches before we each brought additional partners to more explicit conferences. I found myself liking him. He was short and plump with very thick closely cropped bristling hair and a round, pleasant face with eyes that looked oddly anxious when they were not shiningly reassuring. He was constantly rubbing and folding his hands and assuring me that such and such a thing was “entirely understood”; that it was “easy as pie”; that he’d done it a hundred times. And one felt, too, that he had. There was nothing fake or pretentious about the man. He was what he was.

  I was careful, in presenting the proposed merger to my partners, not to evince more than a guarded enthusiasm. I spoke of it at some length at one of our lunches, outlining possible advantages and disadvantages. I pointed out that we witnessed all around us the survival of giants and the decline of dwarfs, that the most successful law firms, like the most successful businesses, were the biggest ones. On the other hand, I anticipated the objections of Oz Bur ley and his clique by admitting that in such a merger there was bound to be some loss of our personality. I did not feel it necessary to add that that personality was precisely what I wanted to get rid of.

  Peter Stubbs surprised me by heading up what I now foresaw would be a minority opposition. He had been present at two of the conferences with Arnheim and had not uttered a word to indicate that he was against the plan.

  “I can perfectly see that this merger is going to tempt a lot of you,” he said in a tone as moderate as my own. We were all trying to be cool. “And I say at once that I realize that my possession of independent means makes me less vulnerable to that temptation. If our firm should fall apart or go under, I could survive, so the fact that the merger makes us financially sounder is not an inducement to me. I simply don’t want to practice law with the sort of men who make up Arnheim & Buttrick. And there isn’t much point in my trying to tell you why that is so, because I can’t prove a thing against them. Call it a hunch, a smell, an instinct, anything you want. I just don’t like them.”

  This was followed by a general clamor of questions about what it was that Peter didn’t like, during which I remained silent. When people have nothing but “hunch” to go on, they will make themselves ridiculous if obliged to talk long enough. A number of the partners, frankly allured by the prospect of greater pay with greater security, became a bit sharp in cross-examining Peter. By the end of our meeting I was reasonably sure that the project had got off to a good start.

  Oz Burley confirmed this, walking with me back to the office afterwards, though not in a very flattering fashion.

  “Well, I guess you can draw up those merger papers, Bob.”

  “You think they’re really for it?”

  “I think you’re really for it. And enough of the rest will go along.”

  “I believe it’s the best thing for the firm.” I glanced sideways at that arrogant profile. There was not the least hint of anger or resentment in it. “Tell me something, Oz. Why do you dislike me so?”

  “I don’t dislike you in the least, Bob. I rather admire you, actually, for being so completely what you are. But what you are, you see, is the enemy. I have to fight you. You’ll win, of course, but I still have to fight you.”

  “Oz, what on earth are you talking about? Why am I the enemy? Enemy of what?”

  “Oh, there’s no point in my going into that,” he replied with a laugh that was almost good-natured. “If you could see it, you wouldn’t be the enemy. And that’s my affair, really. Not yours.”

  “Well, maybe in the new firm we’ll learn to be friends.”

  “I think if I joined the new firm, that might be possible, even probable. But to avoid it I’ll stay clear of the new firm.” He chuckled. “Maybe I’d better have a chat with Peter Stubbs. Maybe I can fix up something for myself with him.”

  He left me to catch up with Peter, who was walking just ahead of us. But shocked though I was by this brief and unpleasant exchange, it was as nothing to what awaited me that night at my meeting with Sylvia.

  She had a dinner, as it happened, to which she was not taking me, a new client, and we had agreed that I should come to her apartment for a drink before she had to go out. She was already dressed when I arrived and seemed brimming over with a burden of interesting news.

  “Guess what.”

  “You’ve got a commission from the pope. The Vatica
n is raising funds.”

  “So funny. Listen. Ethelinda’s ready to sign that new will.”

  “Heavens. When?”

  “Soon. With that and the merger Sylvia Sands should be able to chant her Nunc Dimittis.”

  “But isn’t it precisely where you are beginning, not ending?”

  “Precisely. It is Sylvia Sands who is demitting. It will be Sylvia Service who is commencing.”

  I was speechless. But had I not known that this was bound to happen? What I think I was most conscious of was that I had never felt farther from Sylvia. “Unfortunately, I’m still married,” I at last found breath to say.

  “As if I didn’t know that. Look, Bob. You’re not the only one who knows the law. Gil Arnheim has given me the services of a charming young woman lawyer in his firm who is an expert on domestic relations. She assures me that from the moment a separation agreement has been signed by you and Alice, she can obtain a divorce decree for you, binding and valid, within forty-eight hours.”

  “But will Alice sign?”

  “You know she will. And I know she will. I’ve talked to her. She has promised not to stand in our way. The separation agreement can be drawn tomorrow. Give her what she wants; her demands are absurdly modest. And then you and I can be married on Friday!” When I said nothing, but simply continued to stare at her, I saw her eyes turn into what I can only describe as fireballs. “You don’t want to? Is that what you’re trying to tell me, Robert Service, that you don’t want to? After all I’ve done for you? Jesus God, you’d better get out of here before I kill you!”

  “Can’t we discuss this rationally?”

  “No! And don’t imagine that Ethelinda’s will can be signed if we’re not married! Or that your merger will go through if that will isn’t signed. Do you think I’m a total nincompoop? Do you think I’m your slave?”

  I know that it is often considered affected and artificial in literary compositions if a character, in a moment of crisis, compares his situation to that of another character in a remembered novel or play. Yet this often happens to me. Perhaps it is a flaw. Perhaps I should always be involved, purely and simply, with my own emotions and those of the person with whom I am in passionate accord or, as now, in passionate disaccord. Anyway, I am not like that. My mind is instantly faced with a parallel or parallels. And at that moment, so help me God, or World Principle, or Soul of the Universe, I thought of the fiery villainess of Racine’s tragedy Bajazet, the Sultana Roxane, who offers the eponymous hero the choice of death or marriage before she will unleash the army to dethrone his brother and bring him to the crown. But like Bajazet my thoughts went to the gentler Atalide or Alice.

  “I’ll talk to you tomorrow,” I said, rising to go.

  “You’ll talk to me right now! Jesus, Bob, do you know all I’ve done for you?”

  “I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”

  “You’re not leaving this apartment, you son of a bitch! You’re—”

  She had put herself between me and the door, but I thrust her firmly aside, and not waiting for the elevator, hurried down the fire stairs. I heard a loud crash at my feet and looked down to see glass all over the stairs. Sylvia had hurled her glass at my head. Thanking God for her bad aim, I rushed out into the night.

  17

  I THINK I had been as much shocked by Oz’s calling me the “enemy” as by Sylvia’s frenzy. I had long been aware that people might consider me that if they knew my inner thoughts, but I had also supposed that I should think the same of them had I known theirs. I had believed that the dichotomy is so great between what human beings suppose normal human character to be and what it actually is that when they chance to perceive the truth about an individual they jump to the conclusion that he must be “bad.” But what bothered me about Oz’s judgment of me was that I had not betrayed my private thoughts. He had simply deduced them from my acts.

  I had a very small opinion, to be sure, of Oz’s values, but the episode recalled unpleasantly to mind two others in which I had been made to feel a kind of evil presence. The first went back to my boyhood, when I was twelve, and it was important, I suppose, mainly because the critic was my mother, who, in a quarrel between me and her own mother, had unhesitatingly taken the latter’s side.

  Grandma Evans, a “gallant” impoverished widow, had made her home with my patient, long-suffering parents. I suppose she had a kind of faded prettiness. Prettiness in an old woman seemed to my adolescent eyes a contradiction in terms, but her silvery, high-piled hair and soft gray eyes and very soft cheeks were agreeable enough. She made a great fuss about “being no trouble” and asking for no special favors; she was always saying that she knew she couldn’t live a champagne life on a beer income and that she had been raised, thank God, not to think herself a whit better than anyone else, yet “pesky” headaches and “dratted” colds had a way of entitling her to the “rare treat” of a tray in bed or my afternoon services as a messenger on repeated trips to the drugstore. She was one of those who, when she had a mild seizure or heart attack, maintained with a proud blush that she had been “silly,” and she would snort with contempt at anyone who reminded her to take her umbrella or overshoes if the sky threatened rain. Yet these airs, I early suspected, were nothing but the mask of a devouring hypochondria and a crawling fear of death.

  It exasperated me that my parents were taken in by this. “Isn’t Mother wonderful?” they would exclaim if the old lady consumed a second cocktail that turned her tiddly and even more loquacious than usual. They made an idol of her, and idols, when they are human, are very covetous of worshipers. Grandma had a nostril quick to pick up defection, and she took an early and heartily returned dislike to her only grandson.

  Ordinarily my little spars with Grandma ended in a stand-off, but one of them had a more serious finale.

  Mother had called out from the kitchen to ask me to go back to the grocer’s for an item she had forgotten, and I suppose I had been surly about it. Grandma and I were alone on the porch, she with her knitting, I with my Dumas novel.

  “Aren’t you going on your errand, Bobby?”

  “In due course.”

  “Your mother said she wanted you to go now.”

  “I’m going!”

  “I don’t think you should speak to me in that tone.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “And I suggest when your mother asks you to do something, you should do it more cheerfully.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, you want to show that you recognize all the things she’s done for you, don’t you? You want to show her that you love her, surely?”

  “But she knows that.”

  “Perhaps she doesn’t always know how much.”

  “I think she knows just how much.”

  Grandma looked at me critically. “Then perhaps you should try to make her feel that you love her more than you do.”

  “Wouldn’t that be a lie?”

  “Hardly a lie, Bobby. Because if you made the effort, you might find that indeed you did love her more.”

  “Why should I love her more? Isn’t it enough the way it is?”

  “Love is never enough the way it is. And if I may say so, young man, yours could do with a bit of stretching.”

  “I bet I love Mummy as much as you do!”

  “As I do? My own daughter! How dare you say such a thing? What do you know about a mother’s love, you fresh young whippersnapper?”

  “More than you think. You’re always making Mummy wait on you hand and foot. And I’ve seen you deliberately delay until she was comfortably settled on the sofa before asking her if she’d go upstairs to bring you your shawl.”

  Grandma at this started to moan and groan as if she were having one of her heart spasms; she clutched at her chest and cried, “Oh, oh, oh!” Of course, she was faking, but self-pitying old hypocrites are capable of working themselves into dangerous states, if for no other reason than to get back at those who have done them an imagined injury. And Grandma certain
ly had her revenge that day, for Mother came flying out to the porch to help the old lady upstairs to bed, where she remained for twenty-four hours.

  Mother waited until Father came home, and they had a conference alone before supper. At that meal Mother delivered an obviously rehearsed homily in a high, sad, hurt tone.

  “Your father and I, Bobby, are deeply concerned at your treatment of a defenseless old woman. You chose, deliberately I’m afraid, to strike at her in her most vulnerable area. I cannot conceive where you could have learned such cruelty.”

  “From her!” I could have shouted back, but I knew it was hopeless. They would never understand. Dimly I realized that my only effective revenge would be silence, and this I rigidly maintained. But I don’t think I have forgiven Mother to this day.

  The second episode, which occurred when I was seventeen, was much more serious, because here the critic was a person whom I admired. It was Cy Hawkins, or “Mr. Hawkins” as he was always known to me, an English teacher at the Haverstock School in Millbrook, New York, which I attended for one year before matriculating at Columbia. But to preface the tale of my encounter with Mr. Hawkins, I should first give an account of my friendship with Lindsay Knowles.

  The Knowleses lived in Keswick, not far from my family, but, oh, the difference. Their great brown multi-winged wooden mansion rambled all over the top of its little hill and was approached by a long macadam drive bordered by rhododendron. I had heard my father say that the criterion of the wealthy was that their houses should not be visible from the road, and I had at once conceived a permanent regard for those whose domiciles met this standard. Our own poor dwelling, of course, looked right out on the street, as did those of most of my high school classmates, but there were some who enjoyed the delectable invisibility, and I identified them enviously with those gateposts in Keswick through which I rarely passed: stone pillars with statues of birds or animals, or silver balls; massive columns supporting heavy opened portals of elaborately wrought iron; simple wooden farm posts, or sometimes simply a break in a well-cut hedge or, at most, two green bushes cut to resemble trees, which my mother, in her unaccountable way, found in “better taste.” These estates, or “places,” as I learned it was more refined to call them, seemed to me so many Elysian fields at the end of whose graveled drives rose domiciles fit for gods.