Diary of a Yuppie (2 page)

"Do you suppose Albert Lamb would think twice before using a weapon like this against any officer of Atlantic?"

Blakelock has to pause at this. "Well, you have to remember that Albert feels that Atlantic is trying to destroy his very lifework in Shaughnessy. A man in that position gets pretty desperate. But you and I are not in that position, Bob."

"Our client is. Atlantic has very high stakes in this case. What can we lose, Mr. B, by taking the chance?"

"Nothing, I suppose, but honor."

"Where is that? Didn't we check it when we went into the takeover business? Why don't you let me try it, anyway? There's nothing like one bit of dirt to start up another. People hearing about the case may suddenly remember more. We may dig up enough dirt about Lamb to blow up his whole board of directors!"

"No! Never! I won't have it!"

His indignation makes me bold. "You talk about honor. What about duty to a client?"

"Can you really believe that it obliges me to pick up a tarnished piece of family gossip and puff it into a scandal that may destroy Albert's peace of mind and perhaps his brother's very life?"

"Why is that relevant? It's a fact, isn't it, that Albert Lamb covered up the crime of a junior officer? And isn't it our duty to use every fact at our disposal? Lamb knows that as well as we do. When he got into this fight he knew that everything in his past would be pored over and used. That's how the game is played, Mr. B, and what's more, I think it's basically how it was always played. Only today we're franker about it. And I think that's better."

"I think it's worse. Much worse. I think it's obscene, and there's no place in my law practice for obscenity."

In the silence following this I look up at last, intending defiantly to meet my boss's eyes. But he has turned his back to me, and his shoulders are stooped with what strikes me as a rather melodramatic expression of dismay and grief.

"You'd really sling that kind of mud, Robert?" the sad, now deep voice rumbles at me.

"I'd sling any mud I could make stick. Albert Lamb is the key to the whole defense."

"Even admitting it's mud?"

"But legal mud, Mr. B!"

"I had not been aware that mud observed these distinctions."

"Why shouldn't it?"

"Robert, you appall me. You would really, for a dubious advantage to a client, so bespatter your adversary?"

"You mean it would be all right if the advantage were less dubious?"

After another solemn silence Mr. Blakelock speaks with a faint note of weariness. "Let me put it very simply, then. This material will
not
be used."

"Can't we think it over for a day or so? Give me a little time to convince you."

"I'm not going to change my mind, Robert. The material on Lamb's brother will not be used by this firm in a derivative stockholders' suit or in any other way. I am no longer concerned about that. What concerns me much more is your amorality. It comes as a sad surprise to me. I feel almost as if I did not know you."

"Have you ever wanted to know me?"

"Go home, Robert! Go home before I lose my temper! Take the weekend off; stay away from the office. Tell your darling wife what you have told me and listen carefully to what she says. I miss my guess if she will not agree with me. Let her help you, my boy. Let her guide you! I fear I must have been a false leader."

"Mr. Blakelock—"

"Go home, son, go home! I've had enough of you for one day."

O
H, YES
, I have a very definite feeling that this crisis is not going to pass. I may find myself making a significant addition to the file drawer of my penciled fulminations. What a crazy collection it is—hundreds of pages of myself recording or imagining my talks with others! Before I married Alice I even used to write love letters to girls I hardly knew, or didn't know—sometimes to movie stars—which of course I was never mad enough to mail. When I was angry with people I would write down all the terrible things that I wanted to happen to them or draft legal documents dealing with their arraignment and condign punishment. I wrote out my dreams in the most copious detail and learned not to blush at my daytime erotic fantasies. I think I have learned the hard lesson that it is perfectly possible for a man to know himself if he will only accept the premise that he is probably not very different from his neighbor.

Only yesterday, for example, I encountered my fellow clerk, Glenn Deane, on the steps going down to the 77th Street subway stop. He was out of tokens and asked if I had an extra one. There was a long queue before the booth. I said I was sorry, that I had only one. In fact, I had four in my pocket when I left him to stand in that queue.

Now what am I telling myself? That Glenn would have done the same thing? Not necessarily. His own form of meanness may not embrace subway tokens. But I am confident that it embraces many larger things. It so happens that I buy twenty tokens at a time, and that I like to see how long they will last me. It is a kind of game, or perhaps the vestige of some ancestral miserliness; I may enjoy the clink of "golden" tokens in my palm. Yet I would willingly lend Glenn a thousand bucks, which is considerably more than he would ever lend me. This goes to show, not that I am more generous than Glenn, but that meanness is not measured by the amount withheld. We are all mean about something, which means that we are all mean.

Take another example. The other day, again in the subway with Glenn, I emitted a silent but smelly fart. I could see by Glenn's puckered nostrils that he had noted it, and by a glance at a stout black woman standing before him and a shrug, I managed to shift the blame. Thousands of people do that kind of thing. It is not nice to do them, but it is better to face the fact that one does. I used to be ashamed of being scared in airplanes, and when I ceased to be ashamed, I ceased to be scared. As a matter of fact, I usually take care
not
to fart in the subway.

Which all means that I believe I have occasional insights that some of my nearest and dearest lack. I certainly think that I know a good deal more about Mr. Blakelock than he knows about himself.

To describe him. At sixty-nine Branders Blakelock is a tall, spare, ungainly man, bulging and tightening in the wrong places, with a high bald dome surrounded by a fringe of curly gray hair and a smooth bland face with small, shiny, twinkling blue eyes. His voice, which can be stentorian in court, is also capable of high, almost falsetto notes, and he has an exploding, cackling laugh which would be almost an insult were it not largely used to applaud his own sharp wit. He is brilliant, and he knows it and is not in the least ashamed to show that he knows it. At the Irving Association, his favorite club, named for the sage of Sunnyside and of which he has been president for some years, he loves to address the membership, either informally at the long table where he is famed for his barbed stories of New York worthies, past and present, or at the monthly dinner meetings, where he reads out the obituary list, ending in sweet, mournful tones with the famous couplet of William Cory's:

"They told me, Heraclitus, they told me you were dead;
They brought me bitter news to hear and bitter tears to shed."

For Blakelock is very much a man's man. He is gallant with the ladies and pretends to be the slave of his dull, plain wife, but he really lives for his own sex, at the office pacing up and down his chamber and tearing apart the suggestions of his clerks, or at the Irving Club in the activities just described.

Is he a great lawyer? A great trial lawyer, perhaps. He is an unblushing showoff, sometimes soft, sly and humble, sometimes a thunderbolt-hurling Jupiter, but more often the mildly amused, gently cynical gentleman whose scholarly achievements and urbane sophistication never cause him to lose the common touch. He is a bit on the old-fashioned side, with a twist of Arthur Train's Mr. Tutt, the sharp old Yankee lawyer with the heart of gold, who beats the dirty shyster at his own game to save the widow whom the latter is trying to fleece. But the qualities that shine in the courtroom are less glowing in the conference chamber, where men are trying to get at the truth and not camouflage it And as no big firm can survive on litigation alone, Mr. Blakelock must spend more hours in his office than in court. And I don't think he really likes it when he has to fool not so much other people as himself.

For that is what men toting a bag of puritan principles must do when they practice law. Hoyt, Welles & Andrew, like many of the old-time corporate law firms, had at first disdained takeovers as dogfights to be left to less reputable practitioners, but when takeovers became the principal indoor sport of American finance they had no choice but to learn the game or lose their clients. And it did not take Blakelock long to become as sharp at the sport as anyone else. But this has vexed him.

He has always, for example, been uneasy about the jargon of this type of corporate conflict. He either carefully avoids use of such terms as "bear hug," "shark repellent," and "blitzkrieg," or else articulates them with a sardonic and venomous precision. He detests my casual use of them. Here is a conversation we had at the beginning of the Atlantic-Shaughnessy affair, when I happened to use the term "golden parachute."

"Does it never strike you, Bob, that these labels may be the true moral indicia of what we are doing? Historians have always professed to find illumination in the vernacular."

"I don't find it necessary to decide."

"You just go ahead and do what you think you have to do?"

"Like you, sir."

"Oh yes, oh yes." The glinting eyes darken, and lumps of mucus change place rumblingly in the throat. "A job's a job. If you take it on, you do it. No one knows that better than I. But I suppose I'm cursed by an inner mentor that sits above the turmoil of my spirits and points out with glee: 'You're a shyster, Branders Blakelock. Or if you say you're not, will you kindly explain the difference?' There's no such devil in your heart, Robert?"

"If there were, I'd send him packing. Isn't that what you pay me for?"

"It's what we're making you a partner for—on New Year's Day next. But I'm probing you, my friend. Do you mind? I'm trying to discover if you can really be so happily free of the cancer of an inner judge. Have you
no
doubts? Even when you see the tail of the predator consuming its prey already clamped in the jaws of a larger predator? Does it not remind you of those chain-of-life charts where you see the otter eating the fish that has swallowed the frog that has gobbled the fly? Ugh!"

"Well, it's life, isn't it?"

"Perhaps you even like it." He has left the lectern now and taken a step closer to my chair as if to examine a curious object. I sigh with no attempt to conceal it. "Perhaps you conceive it to be a man's role. Macho, isn't that the term? With all that curly blond hair and those blue, blue eyes! Young America in a Will Rogers film. And yet isn't there something lean and hungry behind that mask? I know because I've made use of it, God help me! Maybe it's your generation. God is dead, and the frontier is gone, and there are no wars to fight, but a man must still use his fangs and claws. After all, there has to be
some
fun in life!"

"Look, Mr. Blakelock." I have always found it awkward to use his Christian name, though he has repeatedly asked me to. "I'm not responsible for the low price of common stocks. It's not my fault that there are companies that take advantage of the market to buy up other companies. I thought you believed in a free economy."

"I do. I do."

"Well, we're adjusting to it, that's all. And helping our clients to do so. Why make such heavy weather of it?"

"Because it seems such a travesty of the American dream!" Now he is pacing the chamber again, the great professor on the dais, peering from a murky past to a misty future. "The old robber barons at least covered our land with rails and factories. But their successors simply devour one another. We may all end up in the distended bellies of a few somnolent titans that will sit facing each other across the desert of our poverty like giant Buddhas, too gorged to do more than gaze with blurred eyes at their own navels."

"You forget the antitrust laws."

"They seem very resilient these days. Everything favors amalgamation. Even the computer, which is nothing but an instrument for reassessing what we already have. New ways of looking at the old. Our future has dwindled to a change of labels."

"Which reminds me that I must be getting on with changing the label of Shaughnessy Products."

"Right you are, my boy! Shut the old windbag up! You know that for all his prattle he's in this bloody business right up to his prating mouth!"

The raid on Shaughnessy was peculiarly obnoxious to Blakelock because Albert Lamb, the target's president, had been a member of his Saturday golf foursome at the Antlers Club in Rye. Because of the ironclad secrecy in which preparations for a takeover had to be shrouded, it had been impossible for Blakelock to give the faintest warning to his friend. Indeed, it had behooved him not to betray the danger by the least change in his normal attitude and behavior. Even a failure to appear at the first tee on any Saturday morning at nine might have been taken as a sign of embarrassment, and Lamb might have speculated: embarrassment over what?

How well I could imagine that last Saturday morning before the raid! The low, rolling, wooded, autumnal hills, yellow and brown and hectic red, the azure sky with here and there the puff of a cloud, the sweeping yellow-green course, and the four old boys in their tweeds, chattering comfortably (except for Mr. B) as they ambled along, on all the topics so dear to them, happy and secure in their male solidarity, free of the sharp words and possessive affections of the other sex.

Perhaps they were discussing the war in Afghanistan that has just started. All would have expressed outrage at the Russians, Mr. B with particular violence.

"The devil about the hydrogen bomb is that we can't afford to do the right thing. It's too dangerous. But at times I feel that if we don't take some chances, we're going to lose our souls as surely as the Soviets have."