Powers of Attorney (19 page)

When he returned, he was still in no condition to be in charge even of accountings, and he would have been lost but for the kindness and tact of his cousin. Tower, a huge, grumbling, waspish, exhibitionistic lawyer, who concealed a genius under the splashing flow of his platitudes, had a sense of responsibility, amounting almost to an obsession, for his family. Brooks was his mother's nephew, and Brooks had to be looked out for. He conceived the plan of justifying Brooks to the other partners in the role of a business getter, or at least of a business holder, and he made him the firm's personal representative, placing him on charitable boards and committees of lawyers' associations, sending him to legal banquets and bar conferences and delegating to him the entertainment of clients. And Brooks, responding with the deepest gratitude, adopted as best he could, as the years in this new niche sped comfortably by, the appearance of what his cousin presented him as being, that of the perfectly charming and worldly-wise old gentleman. His figure was slim and dapper; his soft thick hair cut into his high forehead in a fine grey triangle, and his long, brown intelligent handsome face bore spots but no wrinkles. What was best of all was that his friendly twinkling sky-blue eyes and his fine aquiline nose gave the impression of a domesticated eagle who remembered the days of his soaring above pine forests and rocky crags. When Brooks told the young clerks stories of old lawsuits and distant triumphs, in his pleasant, crackling, beautifully modulated voice, with a gesture here and there that seemed the replica of one made in oral agruments before Holmes or Cardozo, they believed him. They believed him implicitly until they were disillusioned—which, alas, was only too soon the case—by their seniors of a few months.

“Mr. Brooks? A splendid old fraud. Something out of Dickens. The partners put up with him because of the boss. When old Tower kicks the bucket, they'll send Brooks to the glue factory.”

And, indeed, when the surrogate died, and the scramble for his clients began, poor Brooks could not even get his nose in the pot. The Standard Trust Company, prize of the collection, went, of course, to Tower's successor, Clitus Tilney, and the corporations to the other corporation partners. Even the individual clients passed Brooks by. Old Miss Johanna Shepard, with all her city real estate, went to Waldron Webb, and the Baxter family to Morris Madison. But the bitterest blow of all was when Mildred Tower, the widow, told the new senior partner that she would prefer to have her husband's estate handled by his nephew than by his cousin. And who was this nephew but the bungling Rutherford whose gaffes in will drafting had been more than once covered up by Brooks before they could be spotted by the stern avuncular eye? Where was there even a bush in this jackal-infested desert?

Clitus Tilney called Brooks in for a conference. He was as kind as he could be, as kind as old Tower himself, but he was not a relation. Had Brooks thought of retiring? He, Tilney, personally wouldn't have believed it had he not checked the records, but facts were facts, and Brooks
was
sixty-nine, four years over the mandatory retirement age in all the big banks. A pension of sorts could be arranged, perhaps half of Brooks' current drawing account. What about it?

“Oh, it's not the money, Clitus,” Brooks said grandly, knowing full well that Tilney was aware that he could barely get by on his present percentage which was smaller than the most junior partner's. “With taxes what they are, a little more or less income won't make all that difference. But what happens to an old war horse when he's turned out to pasture? Othello's occupation and all that? What would I do?”

It was indeed a question. Brooks had no life outside the firm, except for Mrs. Brooks and their polio-crippled daughter, Angelina, and the function of those two pale-browed, serene and uncommunicative women, besides keeping up the Gothic shingle house in Staten Island, was to provide, in long evenings of needlepoint, the appearance of an audience for his saga of the day's battles. The firm was his club, his fishing lodge, his cottage on the seashore; it was the source both of his gossip and of his intellectual satisfaction, the fountain of his friends, his brothers and now of his sons.

“I thought perhaps that in the evening of life, as they put it,” Tilney pursued gently, “you might like to be free of the cares and troubles of practice.”

Brooks, looking into those large encompassing grey eyes, understood that Tilney pitied and sympathized. “But what is life without cares and troubles?” he riposted, maintaining the pose of the old soldier obliged to seek the assistance of the younger general, an assistance, however, that would be amply repaid by the old soldier's experience in days of yore. He knew that Tilney saw through it, but at the same time that he was grateful for it. It preserved the dignity of each. “Is the game worth the candle otherwise? Can a man really love if he doesn't know jealousy? My biggest kicks have come out of the things that have given me my biggest worries. And I hope it'll go on that way for a bit. Not too long, Clitus, but just for a bit. I'd like to die at my desk like my cousin, Reginald.”

Tilney coughed and looked down for a few moments at a memorandum. When he spoke, it was in the harder tone that he used for definite propositions. Tilney never allowed the discussion to be general for long. “I've always had a theory, Sylvester, that the office should have a final court of appeal to review the wills and trusts. One partner who should read them before they're executed to check for violations of the rule against perpetuities and so forth. He would put his initials in the margin of a special copy with the date of his approval, and that would be the green light to go ahead with the signing. Never before. To let a client execute a trust before those initials appeared on the copy would become a capital offense. How would such a job appeal to you?”

Brooks smiled warily. The idea had instant appeal, but he caught a whiff of danger, and he knew that now or never was the time to treat with Tilney. “I could review the instruments for any mistakes under the law of wills and trusts, of course,” he answered and then cleared his throat cautiously. “That is, if I don't flatter myself. But I don't think I could be responsible for all the tax aspects. Tax law has gotten so complicated that it really needs a specialist. We old-timers can't be expected to keep up with every last wrinkle of regulation that the Commissioner dreams up.”

Tilney moved swiftly to tie up his bargain. “I guess we can leave taxes out of it. But you will be the last word on everything else.” Tilney frow'ned and shook his head ruefully. “Including typographical errors. Our girls get sloppier and sloppier. The new system will start on Monday. Oh, and Sylvester.” Tilney always put his visitor in the position of being about to rush off and having to be detained. “I want you to take a ten percent cut next year. The young men keep crowding in on us, you know. Age must make way gracefully. A couple more years, and I'll start hacking myself.” He rose to walk with Brooks to the door. “Remind me if I don't, Sylvester. Remind me if I become piggy. We all have to remember that the young men are the future of the office.”

Brooks, however, was too elated to do more than make a mental note that as he would have no further traveling or entertaining to do, he could save money on clothes. The new project was announced at the partners' Monday lunch. He had hoped that Chambers Todd would not be present, but this hope proved vain. Todd was the partner of whom he was most afraid, Tilney's blunt, direct “executive officer,” who made no secret of his conviction that everyone and everything in the firm that did not promptly pay should be ruthlessly eliminated. And the worst thing about him was that he was a total success himself, not only in the practice of corporation law, but even in the field of Brooks' own supposed priority, that of business getting. Todd's methods made Brooks'—the easy chats on the golf course, the tactful charm at the dinner party, the conviviality of the fishing trip—seem fruitless and out of date. Todd at any social gathering would go straight to the most important man in the room, flatter him in the crudest possible fashion and, more often than seemed decent, add him to the roster of Tower, Tilney clients. When Tilney had finished his brief statement, Todd promptly raised the point that Brooks had known he would not miss.

“What will be the extent of Sylvester's responsibility?” he demanded. “In wills, for example, will he pass on the accuracy of a marital deduction formula?”

Brooks was too old a hand at concealing his panic to betray any of it in the apparently casual glance that he directed at the senior partner. He seemed to be merely yielding the floor to one who had the easy and obvious answer. But the marital deduction! He would have been hard pressed to explain what it was.

“No, we thought that would have been a bit too much for one man,” Tilney replied. “I think the partner whose client it is must assume responsibility that the tax problems have been met.”

“But, for Pete's sake, what does that leave Sylvester?” Todd persisted in his crude way. “Seeing that the measuring lives of a trust are all in being? Checking that the executors are exempted from bond? Any kid right out of law school who can't do those things should get the axe. Let's face it, Clitus, we live in a tax era. Everything's taxes. Whether a client wants to make a trust, or form a corporation, or get a divorce, or even go into bankruptcy, what's the first thing he asks? What are the tax consequences?” He looked around the table and gave a short, contemptuous snort. “I sometimes wonder what the hell lawyers did before the big taxes. Fuss around with the commerce clause, I guess, and try to break wills.”

“Oh, come, Chambers, you're going too far,” Tilney protested. “I think this emphasis on taxes today can be overdone. The old problems, like the poor, are always with us.”

“
Are
the poor always with us?” Todd asked. “Where are they? I pay my cleaning woman more than old Tower paid me my first year in the office.”

In the laughter that followed Brooks knew that the discussion would be lost, and relief overflowed his heart and seemed to bubble into every part of his being to know that his new job was safe.

 

That had been a year ago, and now, at seventy, he still had not made the dreaded error. The new job had started beautifully, with a memorandum issued by Tilney to all hands which described Brooks as the “supreme arbiter” of trusts and testaments. The young men called respectfully at his small office around the corner from the file room, with its neat, clean desk and spotless blotter and its white walls chaste except for a charcoal sketch of Judge Tower, and would nod, with deferential smiles, as they asked: “May I bother the ‘arbiter' with a small matter?” Happily, the first month had contained a number of routine wills and trusts, with such simple provisions as: “to my wife for life, remainder to my issue,” or: “all my residue to my widow, but if she shall die before me, to Saint Andrew's Hospital.” Brooks began to gain confidence as he read them, and as he completed his study of each, he would call the draftsman on the telephone and say, after a preliminary throat clearing, “Oh, Tomkins, is that you? Brooks. I've finished this Catlin will. Could you drop in and discuss it with me a minute?” Of course, he could have placed his initials, in large, blue, sweeping arcs, in the lower left margin of the document and tossed it in his “out” basket with the name of the draftsman clipped to the top. But this procedure would have been offensive to Brooks. He did not like the idea of confidential documents being carried through the corridors by messenger boys. It was more consistent with the dignity of an estate and trust practice and, obviously, with his own function as supreme arbiter, to have the lawyer seeking the approving “S.B.” call upon him in person. It was the least, too, that Brooks' age and seniority should command

“Have a seat,” he would say, when Tomkins appeared, leaning back in his own chair and packing the tobacco into his pipe. “I don't know that there's terribly much to say about your matter, but we'll see.” He would then go through the form of fumbling through a drawer. There was no point in letting Tomkins know that his whole morning had been occupied by that will. “Ah, here it is, I see I've initialed it. Let me just recall it to mind.” He would put on his glasses and scan the familiar first page. “Ah, yes. A good, sound, simple testamentary scheme. In my humble opinion there's too much unnecessary complication these days. Trying to beat the government out of the last red cent and forgetting the more basic things, like what a family really needs. We lawyers can be too smart for our own good sometimes. Do you know how long C. V. Babcock's will was? A document that disposed of a hundred million dollars?”

“No, sir.”

“Three lines.” Brooks smiled amiably at the young man and then slapped the table. “Three little lines. Let me recite them to you, because I regard them as a classic in the history of estate planning. Oh, I know, they wouldn't fit every situation, of course, but it's good idea to remember that they might fit more than you think.” Here Brooks would clear his throat again, eye the young man with a steady, smiling stare and then recite in a low, dulcet tone: “ ‘I devise and bequeath all of my estate, real and personal, to my wife, Mary A. Babcock, and name her executor thereof, to serve without bond.' ” He struck the table again, but this time it was only a tap. “Pretty good, you must admit.”

“I suppose in those days, sir, things were simpler.”

“But the fundamentals were the same!”

Brooks prided himself on being nobody's fool. He knew that the young men were anxious to get back to their work and begrudged the time taken out of a busy day to listen to his reminiscences. But he still thought it was good for them. Where else in the office could they catch the flavor of the past, and without a touch of that flavor did the law not become a mere jumble of tax regulations, to be practiced with a slide rule? He had always had a secret hope that survival would be his own method of triumph. He had loved to visualize himself, in daring moments, as the charming, discursive, admired old gentleman of Tower, Tilney & Webb, the partner whose common sense and broad experience were to prove, in the end, more valuable to the firm than the mere technical expertise of others, the man who was able to unite the generations, to explain Waldron Webb and Chambers Todd to the young and the young to them. He even had a fantasy in which he saved the firm from a schism by raising his arms for peace over a sordid quarrel as to whose name should go first on the door and reuniting the warring factions with the skill of his diplomacy. Even Todd would have to recognize that Brooks' love of the firm transcended all petty ambition.