It so happened that on the night of this last discussion of Cook with Rosina, Howard came home from the office with a very drawn look. He explained it after she had mixed him his cocktail.
“Clarence came to see me in my office today. I knew it was important for otherwise he’d have sent for me. And it was important. He informed me that the executive committee has decided to invite Sam Zebulon to become a member of the firm.”
“I don’t believe it!”
“It’s true.”
“Can’t he overturn the committee?”
“Kate, dear, the executive committee executes only what Clarence tells them! He came to me because he knows of our connection with Zebulon.”
“And did you tell him about the wretch?”
“There’s very little Clarence doesn’t know. But there are also things he doesn’t want to know.”
“Then what are you going to do about it?”
“I’m going to grin and bear it. What else?”
Sam Zebulon was an evil spirit in Howard’s family. He had been a brilliant office boy in Uncle Jules Anthon’s office, so able and quick that Uncle Jules had put him through law school. He had graduated first in his class and applied for a job in the firm of his benefactor. As in those days, Uncle Jules’s firm had been one of the downtown groups that employed no Jews, and he had been rejected. Uncle Jules got him a job in a smaller firm, but Zebulon had apparently harbored a deep resentment that surfaced in the brutal way he handled a lawsuit against Uncle Jules’s son, representing the son’s alienated wife and bringing up unproven charges of child abuse and homosexuality. Zebulon had gone on to become famous for the huge awards he obtained for rather tainted spouses, and his reputation at the bar was cloudy, to say the least. But of recent years he appeared to have somewhat cleaned himself up and won fame successfully representing the thoroughly respectable and clearly wronged wife of one of the nation’s richest men.
“But, darling, this will change the whole character of the firm!”
“Clarence doesn’t see it that way. He says our trust and estate department needs a beefing up, and this is the man to do it. I pointed out that it’s a departure from our policy of only making partners from within, but he says we haven’t the right candidate within. He’s not going to change his mind, so that’s that.”
She knew now that he would never speak again of the matter to his senior partner. Howard looked up to Clarence Cook as his god. But might she not for once try her own hand at the game? The high and unblemished reputation of the firm was certainly one of the major penates on the domestic altar at which she daily dedicated her life. And was not the senior partner her particular friend? Did he not seek out her company at office social events, even to the jealousy of some of the other partners’ wives? With her he could show a side of himself not always visible to those who surrounded him: he could be the reader, the philosopher, the man whose mind leapt to the unknowable beyond the daily grind of the bar. And was he not an idealist? Could he really tolerate a conjunction with such a man as Zebulon if he were possessed of the facts? Never!
The following Sunday, when she and Howard were weekending in their Hampton villa, they were invited to a large Sunday lunch at the neighboring Cook estate. After the meal her host took her for a private stroll to view his rose garden, in which he took great pride, and she found herself seated with him on a marble bench by a fountain irrigated from the lips of carved frogs. It was her moment to speak.
Why did she suddenly think of Mrs. Samson and the dinner party she had skipped in order to take the children on a picnic? Mrs. Samson, it was true, had been a guest at the lunch, and was still in the house, but it was not that. Was it a sense that she, Kate, was not fitting into the world as it was? That she was a dingy bird without protective coloration?
Still, she proceeded.
“Howard and I, Clarence, can’t help wondering if you would be so willing to make a partner of Mr. Zebulon if you knew what we know about him.”
“And what is it that you know, Kate?”
Clarence had at once adopted his bland expressionless legal look. He didn’t flicker an eye or utter a word while she expatiated, nervously and sometimes repetitiously, on the dark side of the man whom she finally summed up as a Uriah Heep.
When Cook spoke, it was with the faintest tinge of threat in his tone. “Did Howard put you up to this?”
“Oh, never!” she gasped. “This is just between you and me.”
“Then that is just where we should leave it.”
Kate hesitated. Did she catch a flash of yellow in those watching eyes? Like the distant glint of lightning on a sultry summer day? Was she approaching the limit of the little meadow specially mowed for her and Howard Rand? Was she daring to step into the dark neighboring woods that she had hitherto seen as simply romantic? But she had a job to do.
“But you must see, Clarence, that the firm is Howard’s life as well as his business. It’s his club, his friends, almost his family. And I wonder if he could bring himself even to speak to a man whom he regards, rightly or wrongly, as evil incarnate.”
“Are you telling me, Kate, that I would have two partners who would not be on speaking terms with each other?”
“I’m afraid so, yes.”
“Then it will be your job to talk Howard out of any such behavior. If Howard is to continue as my partner, it will be necessary for him to be on good terms with every other partner.”
“Oh, Clarence, how can I guarantee that?”
“Because you must. For Howard’s own good and that of his family. Now listen to me, Kate. I am going to tell you some home truths. Howard is a loveable man, probably the most popular of the partners with the clerks and staff. And he is a good and careful lawyer with his deeds and mortgages. In a small town, with a local practice, he would be one of the leaders of the community. But in New York he’s in a league that’s too big for him. If we shut down his department, as some of the partners want to, and farm out its work to a small specialized firm, there would be no other department in which I could place him. He has no expertise in corporate law or litigation, and he’s not the type for either, anyway. He could probably get a job in a real estate firm, but only at a small fraction of what we now pay him. I’ve kept his department going, Kate, but only by using my veto in our executive committee. If I can do that for him, you can do this. Make him see the light.”
It was to Kate as if she had gone up to the observation tower of a skyscraper only to have the promenade deck collapse around her, forcing her to cling to the wall. “It’s going to be hard to tell him all that.”
“Not as hard as you think. People are apt to know more about their tenuous hold on reality than they let on.”
“But what you don’t see, Clarence, is how awful it wall be for Howard to learn that his position in the firm depends on your bounty. He has always liked to imagine that he is an integral part of the firm’s history. That some kind of mande, however abbreviated, had descended from his uncle Jules to his own shoulders. He tried to see the family connection as a kind of figurehead, not as a real power base, of course, but perhaps as a handy symbol of past and continuing eminence in the field of law.”
“Jules Anthon is not only forgotten,” Clarence pronounced roughly, “he was never much remembered. He belonged to that generation of old Knickerbocker lawyers who, with their pompous airs, could actually convince the new robber barons that they were competent counsel.”
“Then Howard didn’t owe his partnership to him?”
“Oh, I don’t say that. In his day the old boy could be quite convincing. His only real genius was that he believed in the image he sought to cast. People were likely to do what he told them to do. It was only after he was gone that they recognized that they’d been had. Howard doesn’t have that kind of brashness. He’s too modest. That’s why he needs you.”
“To help him toe the line?”
“To make him see the world as it is.”
But Kate, noddi
ng submissively as she rose with him now to return to the house, knew that she would not have to talk to her husband of the matter at all. He would go along with the boss. As Cook had said, people know more than you think. It was to demolish her dreams that the senior partner had spoken.
The following Tuesday, back in town, she lunched with Rosina at the Colony Club. Her mind was still under the shadow that Cook had cast, and, incapable of taking much interest in any other topic, she was about to tell her friend that she would like to reconsider the latter’s evaluation of Howard’s senior partner when she was interrupted at her first mention of his name.
“Clarence Cook! But, my dear, it’s mental telepathy! I was just about to tell you that I was in court all day yesterday listening to him cross-examine the boy’s mother in that terrible custody case.”
“What case is that?”
“Don’t you read the newspapers? The Moberly case. Cook is representing the horrid old grandmother. No surprise. She’s the one with all the money.”
Kate now recalled the salient facts. Howard had spoken of it. Old Mrs. Moberly, the heiress of a Standard Oil fortune, was claiming custody of her young grandson on the grounds that her beautiful widowed daughter-in-law had been rendered an unfit mother by her promiscuous love affairs both with men and women. The daughter-in-law, in return, was demanding a settlement, as her late husband’s estate, held in trust, had passed entirely to their son, leaving her penniless. The scandalous evidence submitted by the old lady’s counsel had attracted wide public attention.
“You should have seen, Kate, the way Cook went after poor Daisy Moberly on cross-examination. He might have been Torquemada sending a heretic to the stake! Oh, he almost foamed at the mouth.”
“But maybe she is unfit.”
“Because she’s taken a lover or two? If that’s a crime, half the mothers we know would lose their children. And anyway we know the true reason the old bitch is after her. She’s convinced that Daisy killed her worthless lush of a son by encouraging his drinking.”
“And did she?”
“No! Or if she did, she was hoist by her own petard, for the money she lived on all went to the kid, and she is held to a strict accounting of every penny spent by the Surrogate’s Court. The worst part of the whole business is that Daisy could have been bought off by a fraction of what this trial is costing her mother-in-law. Give her a decent allowance and the right to visit the child on certain days, and poor Daisy would grab it. And the old lady doesn’t even want the boy! No! She wants to disgrace and humiliate the child’s mother. And she’s found just the right man to do it for her!”
“Are you being quite fair, Rosina? How can you be sure Clarence knows all this?”
“Because everyone does. Everyone who knows the Moberlys, anyway. You should have seen him in court, Kate! The apostle of virtue earning his huge virtuous fee. He dripped with venom as he implied the most disgusting things that two women might do to each other. Defense counsel was constantly objecting, of course, and the judge had to sustain him at times, but the damage had been done, and you could see that the black-robed old beetle was enjoying every minute of the filthy argument and was on Cook’s side.”
Kate had long suspected that Rosina might have had to struggle with sapphic urges herself, and that this might be a factor in her embracement of Daisy Moberly’s cause. She had no prejudice against lesbianism except that it stood in the way of what she considered a woman’s primary function: to give birth.
“You don’t think, Rosina, that in representing his client Cook should use every legal weapon at hand?”
“There you go, Kate, sticking up for anyone who has anything to do with Howard’s sacred firm. But let me tell you, they’re not all like Howard. I sometimes wonder if they don’t resent our sex in their hearts. When a beautiful and loveable woman like Daisy Moberly dares to do what she chooses with her own body, when she has the courage to seek love with someone a little more caring than her drunken impotent lord and master, she must be stripped of her offspring and crucified in the gutter press!”
“If she’d only been a little more discreet about it—”
“Oh, don’t give me that, Kate! Cook had detectives trailing her. I heard their testimony!”
Kate suddenly felt she could take no more of this. She rose from the table. “Rosina, I have a terrible headache. I’m going home.”
“Oh, you poor dear! And here I’ve been yakking away like nothing. Let me take you home.”
“No, no, it’s not that bad. I’ll take a couple of aspirins and lie down.”
She shook herself free of her protesting friend and took a taxi home. All the children were at school, and she was able to pull down the shades in her bedroom and be, blessedly, alone. She kept saying one word over and over to herself as she lay in her bed staring up at the ceiling. Vastation. She was having a vastation. She had read the word in a book about Henry James, Sr. He had felt the presence of evil squatting in a corner. So had she.
***
When Rosina called at the house the next morning to reassure herself that her friend’s complaint had been nothing worse than a headache, she found her sitting alone and seemingly desolate in the living room without even a book in her lap. The children were at school, Howard at his office, and the place was silent except for the hum of a vacuum cleaner on the floor above.
“Are you all right, dear?”
Kate looked up at her blankly for a moment before answering. “Quite all right.” Her tone was flat.
“Headache gone?”
“I didn’t have one.”
Rosina pulled up a chair now and seated herself beside Kate. “Kate, dear, what’s the matter?”
There was another pause. “Everything. I seem to have lost my taste.”
“Taste for what?”
“Well, for life, for one. When the girls came home from school yesterday, I found I couldn’t face the usual half-hour of reading aloud to them before their supper. So I told them to get on with their homework. And when Howard came in I hardly heard him at dinner when he told me about his day. He thought I must be just tired, and later he played soothing records for me. But I didn’t care. I didn’t care at all.”
“Maybe you were just tired.”
“It was more than that, Rosina. I saw my whole world differently. The colors had all run. I saw that I had idealized Howard’s run-of-the-mill law firm, that I had turned a blind eye to their greed for fees. That I had overestimated Howard’s contribution to it, that he simply hung on at the mercy of Cook. And that his famous uncle was a myth. I even began to see my children—”
“Oh, Kate, no!” Rosina interrupted.
“Oh, it was nothing really bad, the poor dears. I simply saw the girls being prepared for a life as dull as my own and the boy for one as dim as his dad’s. Howard and I were duplicating ourselves, that was all.”
Rosina was pensive for some moments. When she spoke her tone was decisive. “Perhaps this is a blessing in disguise. Perhaps this is the moment at last when you must make a change in your life.”
“How?”
“You might start by putting down on paper exactly what has happened to you. You know I’ve always seen you as a writer.”
“But I don’t want to write about myself. That’s my trouble. I’m sick and tired of myself.”
“Then write a novel! A Madame Bovary. Wasn’t she stifled and bored?”
“You want me, recovering from a vision of life as Little Women, to leap right into the shoes of Flaubert?”
“Something like that. Why not? What can you lose, anyway, by trying?”
Kate refused to go on with the subject, but when her friend had left, she found herself giving it a good deal of serious thought, and when Howard came home that night she asked him to tell her about the progress of the Moberly case. Pleased to see her interest in things reignited, he spoke of it at some length, extolling the wonderful effectiveness of Clarence Cook’s aggressive tactics.
The next day s
he asked Rosina if she could attend the trial with her, and the two spent the whole day in a courtroom in Foley Square, listening to Daisy Moberly’s desperate lawyer attempt to whitewash his lovely client. In the taxi home Kate felt an idea explode in her mind, covering her whole being with its golden flashes.
She said nothing to her friend, but the whole next day she worked on an outline of a novel, and before a week had passed she was writing it. She devoted her mornings to it as soon as the children had left for school, and she corrected her drafts in the afternoon. She excused herself from all other engagements, but she devoted her evenings to her family. And she found that her good moods had returned; she was happy, even exuberant. Howard was delighted to hear of her new occupation and begged to be allowed to read the work in progress. But Kate would not allow that. She was afraid he would object to her source material.
For her book was based on the Moberly case. This would surely have bothered Howard, but it did not bother her. She had learned in her readings with Rosina that some novelists had to draw from life and others from their imagination. Every character of Charlotte Brontë’s fiction could be traced to someone she knew; none of Emily’s. Well, she was a Charlotte, that was all.
But the picture she was drawing was considerably darker than the one presented by the case. The grandmother was turned into an embittered old woman who had been married for her money and had subconsciously taken her revenge on the man who had never returned her misguided love by spoiling and indulging the weak son he adored until the latter succumbed to gambling and alcohol. When her son committed suicide, she couldn’t face such evidence of her own folly and convinced herself that his wife had driven him to it. The wife, however, is no better than her mother-in-law; she cares little for her young boy and is primarily interested in attaining control of his money to continue her promiscuous round of pleasure. The lawyers on both sides are seen as heating up the controversy to swell their fees, and the judge is intent on giving the scandalous aspects of the case the widest publicity to bring his own name before the voters and enhance his chances for appointment to a higher court. The only pure character is the little boy, who like the eponymous heroine of James’s What Maisie Knew, is well aware that he is only a pawn in the battle of titans.
The Friend of Women and Other Stories Page 15
