Fortune's Hand (11 page)

“Robb MacDaniel! Of all people, you should be able to see that my father's the last man in the world whom anyone, even I, would dare ask for such a favor. No. He is doing it because he wants you and has deep respect for you.”

“Then I'm glad. I'm honored,” Robb said simply. “Overwhelmed and honored.”

The offices of Grant and Taylor occupied a sturdy frame house that had, in another era before there was any structure over ten stories in the city, been the small-town home of some prosperous family with many children. Only a few such families remained on that shady street, now engulfed by the city. Most of the old Victorians were occupied by the offices of lawyers, doctors, accountants, and architects. Yet, alongside all this
professional activity, children still rode three-wheelers on the sidewalk, and the ring of the ice cream man's bell could be heard in the middle of any warm afternoon.

Small touches such as these appealed to Robb. They were unmechanical, a reminder that in his work he was, in essence, dealing not with printed statutes only, but with flesh and blood. There was a human—and humane—quality to the whole environment here, an un-rushed, almost scholarly air in the simple offices where the tall clock on the staircase landing chimed the hour, and the walls were hung with historical engravings.

“This quiet reminds me of a funeral parlor,” remarked Eddy, after paying a brief lunchtime visit to Robb. “Doesn't it get on your nerves?”

“Just the opposite. It calms mine.” Robb was, as always, amused; you could safely wager that he and Eddy would take opposing views.

“Now, I like to deal with a law firm that's like a beehive, with all the bees buzzing. Flying around and buzzing.”

“Different folks, different strokes, as you always say.”

Grant and Taylor, the seniors, occupied the second floor, while Robb was on the ground floor between Jim Jasper and the bright student assistants, of whom Robb himself had been one only a few years ago. Jasper was ten years older than Robb. In time, as soon as either Grant or Taylor should depart, Jasper would move upstairs. Though unrelated, he reminded people, or so people said, of Wilson Grant. The two men had the
same measured style of speech, not quite laconic, with keenly observant eyes and stern features that more often than you might expect relaxed into the kindliest of expressions.

“I suppose,” Jasper said over coffee and a sandwich at his desk, “you have a pretty good idea by now of what to expect. But if you have any questions, remember, I'm here to help.”

“What I know could probably fill a thimble. I know—everybody knows—that this is a family firm in the sense that you keep clients through their generations, and I admire that. My father-in—” he corrected himself “—Mr. Grant and I were discussing what I should be doing to start. I want—and he agrees that I should try—to work my way toward being a litigator. It's what I can do best, I think.”

“So Wilson told me. He himself has been a litigator, but—this is not public knowledge, of course—he has not been in the best of health lately, and at times he finds the strain rather acute.”

Robb nodded soberly. He was still trying to recognize himself here in this place to which he would be going in the mornings, as well as in the place to which he would be returning in the evenings, the bright apartment where Ellen would be feeding or bathing the baby. And thinking of that now, he had to control a little smile.

“You should get married,” he had told Eddy. “Take my word, it's wonderful.”

And Eddy had given his typically Eddy laugh. “Different folks, different strokes.”

Jasper's words brought Robb back to immediate business. “It's a fascinating case, with many angles. Wilson wants you to take some part in it. You'd be getting your feet wet, or at least your toes. Our client, having been told on authority that her husband was dead, killed in what may or may not have been an accident, married again and has two young children. Now the first husband, after thirteen years, has reappeared, discovered somewhere in northern Michigan. That's a story in itself, with its complications, emotional, social, and financial. A mystery and a tragedy.”

“Any human problem that has to go to court to be solved is a tragedy,” Robb observed.

“This is going to be a tough one. Wait till it makes the newspapers.” And Jasper asked curiously, “You don't feel daunted?”

“Not yet. I guess my knees will shake the first time I ever have to stand up in a courtroom and argue a case all by myself.” Robb's eyes roved over the room, the standard office with the family photograph of wife and children and the rows of brown books. “But it's what I've always wanted,” he added, smiling at the memory of himself, fifteen years old, orating like Cicero.

“Good. Too many in the schools today only want to get mixed up in business or politics and hardly ever walk into a courtroom.”

Robb shook his head. “Not I.”

“Well, I'll get everything together and put it on your desk by tomorrow. After you've looked it over, you and I will go up and talk to Wilson.”

“Wilson,” Robb thought. I can't imagine myself calling
him that unless he asks me to. I haven't yet called him “Dad,” either. “Dad” wore overalls, pumped gas, and slopped the pigs. And thinking so, he felt the faintest sting of stifled tears behind his eyes.

This, his first case, began to fill his days, unraveling gradually, knot after knot, on a long twine.

Because the firm was a small one, he was called upon to do many things that in some huge, hundred-member firm he might not have done for years. Jasper had spoken of “getting his toes wet,” yet before many months had passed, he was actually getting his ankles wet. That very first case of the reappearing husband had brought him into the center of the action. He filed motions, he took depositions, and attended every session in Grant's office, along with Taylor and Jasper.

Ellen, like everyone who read the newspapers, was fascinated. “So when the first husband embezzled from the bank, he was already mixed up in a racket?”

Robb smiled. “If the papers say so.”

“What about the house? Who really owns it? The first man bought it and needs money for his defense. Can he really claim it?”

Again Robb smiled. “What do the papers say about it?”

“Well, it seems that way to me, no matter what the papers say. The first husband probably had that body planted so it would be misidentified and nobody would be looking for him. Then he could safely blend into the population.”

“It's not going to work, honey. You're not going to
pump me any more than you ever pumped your father.”

“Okay, okay. It sounds like stuff for a novel, though. Or a psychiatrist, either one.”

“The poor woman's too gentle for what life's handing her. I'd like to see this over quickly, but I know it won't be.”

“You're enjoying every minute of it, though. Matching wits and solving puzzles. You know what my father said about you? ‘He's my boy,' he said. ‘Robb's my boy.' And that's praise, coming from him. By the way, I think he's going to ask you to do something in the Red Cross drive this year. Our family's always made it our prime charity. It goes back to my great-grandmother. I hope you'll say yes.”

“Of course I will.” He was eager. Enthusiasm ran through his veins.

Without being aware of it, so gradual were the steps, he was being fitted into a niche. It was a comfortable niche among old-time citizens who had for generations kept their respected places, living out their years in familiar neighborhoods, and although some few possessed great wealth, they made no display of it. They drove plain American cars and dressed plainly, darning the holes in their expensive old sweaters. Their names were prominent in the pursuit of good causes, to which they gave as lavishly as they could.

Jim Jasper, asking him to help with the hospital's drive for a new wing, took him to a fund-raising dinner and gave him a list of names to solicit. Then someone
from the law school's alumni group invited him to become active.

“I recognized your name when you called me about the hospital,” he said.

Robb had never been deeply involved with religious affairs, but now, since Ellen and her father went regularly to services, he joined their church. When asked to replace a Sunday school teacher who had fallen ill, he agreed. In a secret way that he would have been embarrassed to express, he saw a deep connection between these compassionate teachings and his profession of the law.

One of the congregation's leaders was also a leader in the city's united charities appeal, and he encouraged Robb to work on the committee with him. So now, for the first time, his name appeared on a prestigious letterhead.

He was becoming a familiar figure. Yet often, on a Sunday afternoon, perhaps as they wheeled Julie in her stroller—the most expensive model in the shops, lined with white leather, a gift from Eddy Morse—it would still astonish him to be hailed by people on the other side of the street.

“Who are they?” Ellen would ask. “You seem to know everybody.”

Robb MacDaniel was a recognized citizen of the place that he had entered so few years before with an unknown name and his whole worldly wealth crammed into a rented car. And he was not yet thirty years old.

* * *

Often in fair weather, Ellen would take her sketching board and Julie's toys into the park near the apartment. If ever Robb came home early—an exceedingly rare occurrence—and failed to find them home, he knew where they probably were. At the base of a hill in a grove of copper beeches, there was a group of benches where old men read their newspapers and young mothers watched their children. Whenever she could, Ellen liked to find a seat slightly apart where she might concentrate on her work. Behind them on the top of the hill, he could easily recognize them by the width of Ellen's straw hat.

“I burn easily,” she had told him on that day in the coffee shop, to which she had lured him against his will. Imagine: against his will! And hastening down the hill, he thought that the only bad thing about the work he loved was the time it made them spend apart.

Julie saw him. Her chubby legs pumped the pedals of her tiny red tricycle as she raced. Tied with a red ribbon, her black curls bobbed. At once, he had to pick her up and kiss each cheek. They had a ritual.

“Three kisses. You forgot,” she would say.

“I didn't forget.” And reaching into his pocket, he would present her with the single chocolate kiss that she was allowed each day.

Then, with a wicked look, she would demand another. “Three,” she would say, and knowing how impossible was the request, would laugh.

Ellen was in her third month of pregnancy. Matching her daughter, she wore white and held back her hair with a band of red ribbon.

“You have to look at Mommy's picture,” Julie said.

It was a rough crayon sketch of robins huddled in snow, billows of it on the ground and clouds of it falling out of a somber sky.

Julie gave orders. “Mommy, read my story.”

“I haven't written it yet. It's still in my head.”

“Well, tell it again, Mommy.”

“Are you really doing a story?” asked Robb.

“I think so. This morning when Julie and I were watching some robins in the grass, I remembered once reading about robins who went north too early one year, or the snow came too late, and caught them in a blizzard. They were starving and freezing, and people captured as many as they could find, put them in an airplane, and flew them south where it was warm. Won't that make a lovely children's book? What do you think, Robb? Why should I always illustrate somebody else's book?”

“I think it will be beautiful, and you shouldn't,” he said, feeling such a tenderness for the eager face turned up to his, that it seemed he must be the happiest man in the world.

“Look,” Ellen said when they walked home together. “That's Dad's car in front of the house. I wonder why.…”

They had not long to wonder. “I've had something on my mind for a while,” said Wilson Grant, “and today on my way home it suddenly came to me that I should tell you about it right now. So I turned the car around and came here. It's this: I want to make a trade with you, my house for the lease on this apartment, which is just the right size for me and will soon be too
small for you, if it isn't already.” And he looked around the living room toward the little hall where the tricycle stood with the stroller that Julie had just given up.

“Dad!” Ellen cried. “You love the house. The hemlock fence that you planted, your library with the fireplace—”

“That's true, but there comes a time when what was is no more. I don't have the strongest heart, as you know, and I'm thinking of taking things a little easier, more vacations and no more gardening. You people are starting out. The house will be perfect for you. You were born in it, Ellen. You grew up in it. And now your children can grow up in it.”

She looked away. Her father would not want her to witness his emotion. He had tried to hide it from her even when her mother died, and this, though of a very different degree and kind, was also an emotional moment. She was herself deeply moved. His heart must be far weaker than he wished to admit, and he was feeling the hovering imminence of death.

“The house, sir? I'm rather speechless.”

“Well, no speech is necessary, so that's all right. It's yours. Arthur doesn't want it, doesn't need it, and you folks do, with number two on the way and no doubt more to come. Ellen always said she wants four.”

“It's hard to know how to say thank you for such a gift,” Robb said, and repeated, “such a gift.”

As often, Ellen read his mind. They had taken a ride once to Marchfield, and he had shown her where he grew up. This now is for him, she thought, what it would be for me to be given a mansion. Then, hastily,
she amended that last:
I do not belong in a mansion. I would hate it
. But Robb does belong in our old house, with me. We will sleep in my parents' room, in our same four-poster bed. The walls will be green, the soft color of new leaves. Julie's room will be blue and white. The baby's room—well, that depends. And in her chest she felt a delightful rise of anticipation.