East Side Story (13 page)

"As bad as all that?" she queried. "I suppose you can give up the history. How many people know you're writing it, anyway?"

"Oh, plenty. But nobody gives a damn about it, anyway."

"And to tell the truth, neither would they give much of a damn about this memo that's got you so upset."

What he had shown Agatha was an appalling memorandum exposing the curious dichotomy between the public and private morals of the great Adam Carter, the revered deity of the firm. Agatha, however, in her usual practical way, had taken the matter less dramatically. She suggested it was not so unusual.

"Well, that's just it!" he exclaimed. "That's what really gets me. It's their world. Has it always been their world? It's what has haunted me, isn't it? That I'm a braying ass in an ass's paradise?"

"But that memo is an old one, my poor dear. You know that things were different then. That lots of matters were tolerated then that are frowned on today."

"They weren't as different as all that. If they had been, people wouldn't have taken such pains to hide them. Do you think for a minute that if I offered to print that memo in my history, the whole firm wouldn't shriek no?"

"No, I daresay they would. But don't they hope your history will be a kind of advertisement of their legal expertise? If you're boosting Lifebuoy soap, you won't concede that it ever sinks."

"But that's just what's wrong, Aggie. You've put your finger on it. They don't want a history. They want a panegyric. And you know how much I admired Adam Carter."

"Oh, dear heart, you don't have to tell
me
that."

"I'm sorry. Perhaps I overdid it. Perhaps I've always overdone this habit of seeing the best in people."

"It's an attractive quality. I've always admired it in you."

"But it can be a weakness, too. It might come from the fear of facing evil."

The author of the memorandum was none other than his cousin and partner, David, Adam Carter's son-in-law. When each of the firm members had been asked to write a tribute to Adam Carter to be included in a privately printed volume to be presented to him on his eightieth birthday, David, like a snickering evil godmother, had dropped on his father-in-law's desk this memorandum entitled "The Two Adam Carters." There had been no serious idea of its being incorporated in the tributary volume, but Carter, who had the rare quality of being able to enjoy a satire on himself, provided it was clever enough, had kept the paper among his private ones, which was where Gordon had come across it.

It described first Carter, the good citizen and conscientious public servant, a gentleman of the old school, upright in all his standards, a model of strict and punctilious behavior, tireless in his performance of duty in the high federal offices he from time to time undertook: as solicitor general and Secretary of the Interior of the United States and as ambassador to France. And then the author turned, as from a kind of Dr. Jekyll to a species of Mr. Hyde, to Carter the lawyer, who seemed to obliterate himself and his scruples in the interests of his great corporate clients, coldly justifying their every grab act and attempted monopoly in and out of the courts, seeming to see nothing in the least deleterious in an economy subject to the manipulations of Wall Street and the barons of rail, oil, and steel.

The particular genius of Adam Carter, according to the memorandum, was in his deft use of the holding company. Where there was to be any activity of doubtful legality, such as freight rebates to obliging customers, sweetheart deals to eliminate competition, or cash payments to compliant legislators, it would be done by a corporate entity far enough down the chain of ownership to leave Carter's client free of any legal responsibility. Indeed, Carter would not even represent the victim if it got into trouble. One of the greatest tycoons in the gilded list of those represented by the firm, a man notorious for his ruthlessness in building an empire of rails, was able to boast truthfully that he had never broken a single law.

And Gordon had to admit ruefully to himself that he could imagine his late idol chuckling over this supposed tribute to himself. For Carter the man was quite capable of laughing at Carter the lawyer. Life to him might have been a game where skill was everything.

"Isn't evil a rather strong term to describe what you saw in that memo?" Agatha asked at last.

Gordon had no immediate answer to this; the question seemed to justify the very existence of a dark creed that was forever hidden in the unparted folds of the past. But he turned away now from his loving wife as if she belonged, always and irreducibly, to an irrelevant present. He was plunged in the harsher reality of all that had gone before.

Nineteen thirty-three was to bring even worse news. Gordon's father, Wallace, who had aged badly, had been playing the bull stock market recklessly, even by the standards of the boom era, and with the crash on Wall Street he lost three quarters of his capital. As this was followed by no noticeable economies on his or Julie's part, the results threatened to be dire indeed, and Gordon's sisters complained bitterly that, as his father's counsel, he should have exercised greater control in restraining him. At the same time, his firm was faced with the possibility of a liability for a bond issue the state constitutional validity of which, supported by Gordon's opinion, had been challenged in court. The remnants of Wallace's fortune were ultimately saved, and he and his wife at last placed on a feasible budget, and the challenge to the bond issue was defeated in court, but the double crisis in Gordon's professional and private life had triggered off a black depression, and in 1934 he was obliged to seek a leave of absence from the firm.

His depression, like the national one, hit its lowest point in that dark winter, when Gordon, still unable to work, had been persuaded by the practical Agatha to cut their expenses by spending the year entirely in Maine. It was at this time that Gordon learned of a reorganization of the firm in which David had been raised to the rank of a "named" partner in the new title, Carter, Brown & Carnochan, and his own percentage of the profits severely cut. He had not been notified of this before the decision was made, according to a letter from David, as his leave of absence had suspended his vote in office decisions.

A return to New York was imperative, and two days later Gordon was back in his office, waiting for the call from Mr. Carter, with whom he had requested a fifteen-minute interview. It was promptly granted.

The great man was all sympathy. The high balding head, the long tapering nose, the pointed chin and small steely eyes of this slight but formidable statesman, the stillness of his fixed attention, all combined to receive his visitor as if the latter were the embassy of some great power. He treated all alike, confident in his ability to grant or deny whatever petition might be made of him, and to end, one way or another, any potential dispute.

"I'm glad that you've come to talk to me, Gordon," he began, seizing in his usual courtroom fashion the genial offensive. "Of course, it's about the knock in your percentage. Let me assure you at once that it has nothing to do with the quality of your work, which is, and has always been, first class. You may not know it, my friend, but you and I have something in common. We are both artists. And that is something that is not always true of our fellow lawyers, even the best of them. It may not even be necessary for a successful practice of our profession. Indeed, some might say one was better off without it. It's an inner thing, a state of mind, really. The idea that you're creating something beautiful. Even if its beauty appears only to yourself. If I make a point in a brief or an oral argument, say, one that disposes of an opponent's contention, and does it sharply, conclusively, concisely, in just the right words, neither too many nor too few, I feel a delight in my heart that is like no other joy on earth. And I include the joys of sex and power and health and wealth. Oh, yes, I do! The artist knows an ecstasy in creation that no other man is given. And I believe you know that, Gordon."

Gordon did not know it. But the wonderful thing about Carter, he reflected, was that he was absolutely sincere in every pose that he adopted. While he adopted it. It was what made him a great trial lawyer.

"It may be easier," Gordon replied with a wry smile, "to see the artist in the great orator spellbinding an awed jury than in the drafter of a municipal bond indenture."

"Not at all. The whole thing is in the inner man. I see you planning the different tributaries into which the tolls of the great utilities must flow like the explorer of an unknown river, mapping out the uses to which the mighty flood must be put, so that all may be repaid or profit. Is that not to you a thing of beauty?"

"Anyway, I'm proud to share anything with you, sir." Gordon did not choose to employ, at so lofty a moment, the use of Carter's first name, and the latter's small smile seemed to recognize the distinction.

"Which brings me to the other point. Which less exalted folk might call the central point. The real central point to you and me, Gordon, will always be our work. Compensation is a different matter. My law work I'd do for a mere cost-of-living allowance. What the firm pays me over and above that I regard as my charge for the more pedestrian matter of administration. Indeed, left to myself, I might favor an even split among the partners. Still, we must consider pedestrian matters. We live in different times, my friend. Gentlemen like you and I can't expect to rule the roost. We have in our expanding partnership today new members who seek to match a man's compensation strictly with the revenue he brings in. Indeed, they will not admit any other criteria. And if that revenue is reduced, even by circumstances beyond the power of an individual partner to control, say by illness or family emergency, a corresponding docking of pay must ensue. I don't like it, Gordon, any more than you do. But facts are facts. But do not think that you were without advocates in our reorganization talks. There was one partner, Jack Lawrence, who took your part very strongly. He thought it was you and not your cousin who should be the Carnochan in the new firm name."

Gordon knew that he was beaten the moment the blame for his demotion in the firm was laid on the absence caused by his illness. He would not and could not discuss his depression with the senior partner; it was a subject too alien to the latter's iron mental health. He had wanted to discuss frankly the role that his cousin might have played in the matter, but now that he had learned that David had had to face the possibility, however remote, of actually being outranked in the firm by his humble self, he had all the confirmation needed of what he had already suspected. David in such a situation would have used every weapon he could get hold of. He wouldn't have been David otherwise. And when had David not been an integral part of his life?

He was touched, however, deeply touched, that the great Carter should have so confided in him, and even equated Gordon's attitude toward his practice with his own, but he was still not unaware that he was in the presence of a man who would never have tolerated the even split among partners of the firm's net that he professed to prefer and who, despite his claim of adapting himself to the greedy demands of younger firm members, would never, even in his seventies, surrender a penny of his lion's share of the profits. But Carter was a great man, and who was Gordon to compare himself with such? What had Carter been but his substitute god?

In his subsequent lunch with David, however, he felt himself on more equal ground. The framed, bearded worthies of deceased presidents of the Downtown Association looked gravely down at the table where they sipped a preparatory cocktail.

"I have heard a surprising thing, David. I have heard that my mental state has been the subject of executive discussion and that you seem not to have taken my side."

David, who had just raised his napkin to wipe his thin lips, threw it down on the table in a brave show of pique. "I really wonder if it wouldn't be wiser to hold our meetings in the presence of the entire firm. Or at least record them and circulate them to the partners. This way there are constant leaks and exaggerations, and the whole thing gets out of control."

"Then you did defend me?"

"I couldn't, Gordie. There were some who wanted your share cut more than it was. There was even one who suggested it was time for you to retire altogether. It was I who gave them a more exact idea of just what your depression amounted to and how temporary a thing it was. I think I can say truly that without the interference of your good old pal and cousin, things would have gone a lot worse for you."

Gordon was silent for a long moment, and then reached a hand across the table to shake his cousin's. "Thank you, David. Thank you very much."

He had not believed David. At least not totally. But it seemed a final and conclusive answer to what the world was really like. He could only live with it.

A
LIDA CARNOCHAN,
wife of Samuel, David's brother and the eldest of the six sons of James and Louisa, had every reason to suppose in 1937, the year of her fiftieth birthday, that her life was as much a success as even the most optimistic woman, bred and wed as she was, could have hoped. Yet it was in that very year that the imps of the comic spirit had spied with glee her husband's susceptibility to the lure of the Society of Reborn Christians and her long-delayed trial began.

To understand Alida's predominance in the social world of New York one must first note that she was not only born a Hudson Valley Livingston but of a rich branch of that distinguished tree. As such, she took serenely for granted that no family in America—and few in Europe, for that matter—could claim a perch on a higher twig, and she could shrug her shoulders, with the indifference of pity, at the pathetic dynastic claims of the Carnochans. She had not married her big, strapping, loud-laughing, balding husband for his ancestry, but because he had literally, and despite her own not inconsiderable size, swept her off her feet. Not that she was indifferent to worldly considerations. Far from it. But she had been confident from the start that her aggressive mate would do well in any field he chose, and indeed he had, making a small fortune in investment banking. Nor had he been the philistine that his outward appearance might erroneously have caused a first observer to assume. Sam, for all his noisy love of male reunions and his passion for spectator sports, had a keen eye for the best in hunting and fishing prints, the most exquisite paintings and drawings of birds and animals, and the most finely wrought of early swords and guns. And above all, he was a kindly man of equable disposition, and he loved his Alida.