J.T.

by John Nicholas Iannuzzi

  Reynolds leaned over to J.T. “Sometimes I wish one of these guys would bring out a nice steak sandwich, you know what I mean?”

  “Yes, sir,” J.T. said smiling.

  Dana was smiling too. She heard that.

  “Have you put any of these men in jail by now?” asked the second woman. She sat back from her plate, finished eating, although the plate was virtually untouched. She lit a cigarette.

  “The hearings were intended to find out what legislation was needed to put them in jail,” replied J.T.

  “We don’t have laws to put these slimy people in jail?” asked another man at the end of the table.

  “Now they’re slimy, you notice,” said the man with the second woman.

  “Tres amusant, encore, Booth,” said the second woman.

  Oh, brother! thought J.T. as he looked at Dana. She was enjoying J.T.’s reaction to all these goings-on.

  “May I propose a toast?” said Delafield, standing at the head of his table. “Actually, it’s a double toast.”

  “Then you’ll need two glasses of wine,” said Reynolds.

  “Don’t worry, Archie, I’ve already drunk them,” replied Delafield.

  Everyone laughed.

  “The first part of my toast,” he said—he was glowing a little; he felt good—“is to our host and hostess for a wonderful dinner party …”

  The guests raised their glasses.

  “Hear, hear,” a few of the men rejoined.

  “And, as an aside, to their wonderful chef for having prepared the same. And second, to J.T. Wright, who’ll be the newest associate in my firm starting Monday morning. Welcome.”

  The guests drank.

  Delafield sat down and motioned to the servant to bring him another special drink.

  The woman with the cigarette at J.T.’s table doused the remainder of her lit cigarette in the creamed potatoes on her dish.

  The violinists played at each table. The servants cleared the plates and brought out small fingerbowls set on doilies on small plates. J.T. watched the others take the fingerbowl and doily and place them to the side. He followed suit.

  Suddenly the music rose into a crescendo as three servants marched into the room carrying trays of animals sculpted out of ice cream and sugar, illuminated from below. The guests ahhed and clapped to the beat of the music as the confections were marched around all the tables. One of the glowing confections was placed on each table, so the guests could enjoy it at close range.

  Corks were popped from bottles of Dom Perignon, and toasts were made again to the host and the hostess. This time the chef was called from the kitchen in his floppy white hat to bathe in the glow of the guests’ applause for a magnificent dinner. The chef grinned triumphantly, then returned to his kitchen.

  The women, mentioning something about diets, hardly touched the dessert. Neither did anyone else, for that matter. The animals melted elegantly in the middle of the tables.

  “Chauncey, are you ready for cognac and cigars?” Reynolds asked.

  “I’m not much of a drinking man,” said Delafield softly. “However, to be sociable, perhaps I could go a touch.”

  J.T. thought to himself that he had never been any place before where the people were so amusant.

  The guests moved to the sitting room. The men were served cognac and cigars; the women, after-dinner cordials, except for Mrs. Delafield, who had a martini, straight up. She too must have been getting some of those special drinks during the meal. She seemed ossified, sitting stone-silent and motionless, her eyes barely focused.

  “Glad to have you aboard,” Reynolds said to J.T. “I’m sure that you’ll be quite an addition to the law firm. And while hard work is good for you, don’t let them abuse you down there. Remember, men think, machines work. You know what that means, don’t you?”

  “I believe so, sir.”

  Reynolds drank heartily from his snifter.

  “J.T.,” Delafield called.

  J.T. turned. Delafield was standing with an elegant, somewhat effete-looking man who had been sitting at his table during dinner. J.T. remembered being introduced to him by Dana at the beginning of the evening. “This is George DeValen, a client of ours.” The man’s face was slightly flushed.

  “How do you do,” DeValen said. He had a British accent.

  “Hello,” said J.T.

  Marty joined the group. Dana and Courtnay were chatting on the loveseat by the fire.

  “This is Marty Boxer,” J.T. said.

  “Very glad to meet you.”

  “I tell you, Chauncey, I’m delighted to be a client of your firm and not with the opposition, now that J.T. is joining you.”

  “That’s splendid,” said Delafield.

  “Oh, yes. I’ve seen Mr. Wright in action on television. I wouldn’t want him working against me.”

  It was J.T.’s moment to flush.

  “George, darling,” called a dark-haired young woman with exotic eye makeup and a neckline sliced down almost to her waist; her dress was backless, and the halter was loose around her fulsome and apparently magnetic breasts. The eyeballs of the men could almost be heard clicking to attention. “Come, darling, we have to get to Le Club for Oleg and Gigi’s party.”

  “Right. Right. Sorry, old chap,” he said to J.T. “I’ll probably see you at the shop, eh?”

  DeValen was towed out by the woman with the magnetic breasts.

  “What was that?” J.T. said, to no one in particular.

  “Why, those were tits, son,” said Delafield. He laughed.

  “Chauncey, for Christ’s sake,” reprimanded Reynolds. “Besides, they were bazooms.”

  “Knockers,” countered Delafield, looking around to be sure the ladies couldn’t hear.

  “Boobs,” Reynolds laughed.

  “Melons.”

  “Jugs.”

  All the men were laughing now.

  Reynolds thought for a moment his eyes to the ceiling. “You’ve got me, you son of a gun. I can’t think of another thing … except cantaloupes.”

  “Honeydews.”

  The women turned to see what was causing the uproar.

  Reynolds and Delafield stifled their laughter as best they could, although it surfaced and sputtered.

  “Casaba,” Reynolds whispered. He and Delafield turned and shook with laughter.

  The women turned back to their own conversations.

  The servant in charge of the cognac came by with the decanter again. Reynolds and Delafield didn’t mind if they did. J.T. declined. Marty passed.

  “DeValen is a high roller,” Delafield, now composed, said to J.T. “He’s a financial genius.”

  J.T. looked toward the door through which DeValen had disappeared.

  “Has a strange way of doing business,” Delafield continued. “But he’s a sensation, a powerhouse. He’s been taking over one corporation after another.”

  “Excuse me for a moment, Chauncey,” said Marty. “I think the girls are looking for us.”

  “Scott Fitzgerald was right,” said J.T. as they walked toward Dana and Courtnay, who were standing by the fireplace, looking in their direction. “Rich people are different.”

  “That they are, Otto.”

  “We were just going to come over and rescue you,” said Dana. “My father and Uncle Chauncey can chew your ear off when they’re on Remy Martin.”

  “What time is it now, Marty?” Courtnay asked.

  “Ten forty-five.”

  “You’re not going to go?” said Dana unhappily, looking at J.T.

  “We must in a little while,” said Courtnay. “We have to drive back to the city. And Marty and I have commitments tomorrow we just can’t miss.”

  “Oh, that’s a shame. Are you going to stay the evening, J.T.? You can use one of the guest rooms.”

  “No, I don’t think so,” he replied. “I’ve got to start getting my apartment into shape. I just sublet this little place in the Village a couple of days ago, and everything is still in cartons.” />
  Dana frowned.

  J.T. leaned close to Dana. “Can we talk alone for a few minutes?”

  “Of course,” she said happily. “Let’s go this way.”

  J.T. followed Dana out of the room, looking at the others to see if anyone noticed him leaving.

  Reynolds had.

  Dana led J.T. to a small den across the hall from the sitting room. There was a polar bear rug on the floor, leather chairs, a fire in the fireplace.

  “Sit down, J.T.,” said Dana, sitting on a tufted couch. Dana smiled, waiting.

  J.T. felt ill at ease, as he always had, with women. “I guess I just wanted to say thanks for all the things you’ve done for me so far. I mean, all the things you’ve done for me, period,” he corrected himself, feeling more awkward.

  “That’s not necessary, J.T. If you weren’t as terrific as everyone thinks you are, they wouldn’t have hired you, no matter what I said. So it wasn’t anything I did.”

  “I just wanted to say thanks, anyway.”

  “You’re sweet to say so, J.T.,” Dana said, kissing him on the cheek.

  “No I’m not,” he said frankly. “I think I’d like to be, but I’m really not.”

  “Of course you are.”

  “Dana, I always seem to either hurt people or disappoint them. Especially people who care about me. I don’t know why, but that’s the way it usually turns out.”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  “But that is the way it is. And I just want you to know—not that you care very much about me, or I about you, but—Jesus Christ, I really put my foot in it now.”

  “Relax, J.T. You don’t owe me a thing. And I don’t expect a thing.”

  “I didn’t mean that.”

  “Hush now, and listen, and I’ll tell you why I did it.”

  J.T. sat quietly.

  “I know you’re not in love with me. That doesn’t matter. I just decided, this time, that I was going to do something I felt like doing—”

  “Dana—”

  “No, let me finish this, because this is tough enough as it is. J.T., you’ve become special to me. Men usually think I come on too strong, too independent, whatever. Don’t ask me why, but you make me feel comfortable, happy—oh, I don’t know, you make me feel something that no one else has. Irrational, isn’t it, to love someone who doesn’t love you?” She laughed softly. “But I do. And I don’t want you to feel obligated to me in any way. I’d hate for you to feel that. What I did, I did selfishly. It made me happy. Promise you won’t feel obligated or even mention it again.”

  She looked at J.T. silently. He was staring at the fire. He turned; Dana quickly glanced away.

  “I don’t know what to say to all that, except—”

  “You don’t have to say anything.”

  “Can I say thanks?”

  “You already have.”

  J.T. studied Dana as she watched the fire. Despite what she had said, J.T. knew human nature, knew that you get what you pay for, and you pay for what you get in this world. He wondered if Dana didn’t really believe he owed her something.

  Dana looked at him, surprised by the appraising look in his eye.

  “Can you come to the city one of these days soon?” he asked coolly. “You can help me decorate my apartment. We’ll have dinner, go to a movie?”

  “Yes to all three,” she smiled.

  November 20, 1961

  The offices of Stevenson & Stetinius occupied the twenty-fourth, twenty-fifth, and half of the twenty-sixth floors of a Wall Street tower overlooking Broad Street and the New York Stock Exchange. At the main entrance, on the twenty-sixth floor, a receptionist sat before a small console switchboard from which she could announce calls and clients. A large glass wall behind the reception desk revealed a two-storied library with a wide wooden staircase winding down to the main reading and research area.

  One hundred and fifty-eight lawyers staffed Stevenson & Stetinius. It was one of the largest law firms in the United States. Most of the offices of the young lawyers who were not partners or members were small, cramped squares on the twenty-fourth floor. These cubicles were large enough to accommodate a desk and a chair. On the wall outside each office were small horizontal tracks in which a plastic name plaque was inserted. The plaques, of course, could be easily removed. So, too, the occupants. When the standards for starting salaries in the legal profession were set, they were set against the mythical salaries paid to the young men who sat in these small rooms at Stevenson & Stetinius and other prestigious Wall Street firms. The 1961 starting salary on Wall Street was ten thousand dollars, and young law-school graduates attacked the bar exam with visions of such salaries in mind. The figure was misleading, of course. That salary was paid to perhaps twenty-five or fifty of the top people out of many thousands of graduates in the entire country. And no one said that the Wall Street firms were above hiring several of the potentially top men, maintaining them on payroll for a year or so, and then, after testing the crop, weeding out the excess baggage. So, in reality, a mere handful of young people out of the entire United States were paid the high salary, and the rest of the young legal fraternity were deluded into dreams of grandeur.

  Of course, none of that had anything to do with J.T. Wright. He neither had one of the cubbyhole offices on the twenty-fourth floor, nor was he paid the salary of a neophyte out of law school. If one thought about it, which no one had so far, J.T. Wright was a neophyte out of law school. True, he had had one previous position as a lawyer, that of deputy counsel to the Judiciary Committee, where he had shown that he was a dogged pursuer who could run down the sleekest and fleetest enemy. Yet, in truth, he had obtained no real or practical legal experience on the committee. Hadn’t his interrogations been exercises in asking questions of witnesses who gave no answers? The hearings weren’t struggles in which truth was the quest. They were staged productions, where every question and answer had been ground and reground into a fine paté. If truth were important rather than trouble, then it would be known that J.T. Wright had never been in a courtroom in any official capacity, not even to drop off papers for a clerk to file. He had never even drawn pleadings—not even a stipulation for a two-week adjournment in an actual court case. But no one spoke of that. In fact, no one even thought of that. For when J.T. Wright came onto the law-office scene, there was a special aura about him that derived, of course, from his co-workers having first seen him on the magical television screen—that enchanted glass which transports individuals from the realm of the merely mortal to a special category of humankind. And when J.T. had appeared on the magic glass, he had been seen grappling, or so it seemed, with all sorts of sinister, frightening characters out of the netherworld. As in days of yore, when what was seen in print was revered and accepted as the primal truth, in the age of television, the medium of truth had changed; and what was seen on the magic glass was truth, more acceptable and revered than print. For didn’t the viewer see reality with his own eyes? Surely, if J.T. could cope, as he had appeared to, with such denizens of perdition and abomination as he did on television, he could go into court on a breach of contract, an infringement of patent, a corporate merger, and tackle the vested, eyeglassed lawyer-adversaries sent in by the opposition. And so it was that in the world of the Wall Street lawyer, most of whom never have seen, never shall see, and never want to see a courtroom—although court is the sometimes unavoidable arbiter of their labors—J.T. was a warlord, a samurai, a champion. Of course, such was not a truly respected lot, not in peacetime. Only if the level of negotiations was so reduced as to be totally fruitless, was the leg chain of the champion pulled. For the courtroom practitioners seemed as barroom brawlers to the cool, calm negotiators of the conference room.

  Because he didn’t fit into any of the normal pigeonhole categories of the firm, and because Chauncey Delafield—and, inferentially, RBM—had personally sponsored his joining the firm, J.T. was made a Member. That was the middle of the hierarchy, higher than an associate of the firm, lo
wer than an august partner. And J.T.’s salary wasn’t bad, he thought: twenty-two thousand five hundred a year.

  J.T. was behind the desk of his new office when Joan Hines, his secretary, entered.

  “Mr. Wright, would you like some coffee?” she asked.

  On the members’ and lesser partners’ floor, the twenty-fifth, the offices were commodious and the corridors were wide. Secretaries were posted at desks just outside the attorneys’ doors. On the executive floor, the twenty-sixth, the lordly senior partners were ensconced in ornate, huge offices. Delafield’s office was on twenty-six.

  “No, thanks,” J.T. said curtly.

  God, Joan thought, what a sourpuss. She was going to ask Personnel for a change.

  J.T. knew he was not the model of a pleasant, affable boss. So what? he thought. He displayed exactly the kind of personality people expected of him, one for which he was hired. Besides, he didn’t want to enter the Boss of the Year contest.

  “Do you want me to do anything?” she asked.

  J.T. perused a document on his desk. Yes, he thought to himself, get the hell out of here. “No, not right now,” he answered, not looking up.

  Miss Hines went back to her desk, shared a frown with the secretary at the next desk, then began rereading Catch-22. She had run out of books in her desk, and had forgotten to bring something new from home. J.T. gave her so little work, and dictated so rarely, that she was bored to death.

  Paul Cooper, another member of the firm, came into J.T.’s office. Cooper’s office was directly next to J.T.’s. He, too, specialized in handling suits, or potential suits, relating to RBM products.

  “J.T.,” he said, “I’m going to have a conference this afternoon with the lawyer from Poughkeepsie who represents the several plaintiffs who claim that the design defects in RBM typewriters injured each of their plaintiffs at one time or another—even one girl whose fingers were severed.”

  “Yes?”

  “Well, inasmuch as it is a potential court case, and that would be in your ballpark, I thought it would be a good idea if you were present. Besides, it would really strike them where they breathe, psychologically, to see you involved in this case, to realize that this isn’t a kid’s game we’re playing.”