Powers of Attorney (25 page)

When he next lunched with his friend Reardon, the latter was in ribald mood.

“So you've decided to be a lady's maid no longer,” he commented. “You've decided to be a marquise.”

“I figure the knife of your guillotine won't feel any sharper.”

“Oh, that knife. It's dulled with disuse. As dull as your conscience, man.”

Bayard examined those laughing eyes which so ill concealed their resentment. “I know you think that one pays with a bit of soul for each step up in the great world outside of government,” he retorted. “Yet in my own case I have found just the opposite to be true. I have found that clients appreciate honest advice, even when it proves expensive to them.”

“What kind of honest advice?”

“I was thinking particularly of the propriety or impropriety of certain business deductions.”

“Oh, that yacht of Dahduh's,” Reardon said with a snort. “I know all about that. The whole main shaft was split. He stung the Better Brands Company for it, and they're charging it off as a bad loss this year.”

Bayard's unflinching stare reflected nothing. “You suggest that he was going to get rid of the yacht anyway?”

“I suggest that he was killing two birds with one stone. He got rid of a leaky old tub that might have taken him to the bottom of the sea and acquired instead the lifetime devotion of a brilliant young tax lawyer of unimpeachable respectability. I should say he had a bargain.”

Bayard opened his lips in a faint smile. “So I've been bought, is that it?”

“Not bought, no. Men like Dahduh don't buy. They acquire. He needs your advice and the name of your firm, and he's willing to pay high for it. But what he
does
with that advice, you'll never quite know. He has his accountants. And
other
tax lawyers. On a lower level. And one thing you can be sure of, old man. He's tipped his hand once to you, and he's learned not to do it again. All the plays that you'll see from now on will be straight as arrows.”

“Can a lawyer ask more?” Bayard queried coolly and turned his attention to the menu.

Nobody watching Bayard walk back down Wall Street after lunch, carrying his tightly rolled umbrella despite the spring sunshine, would have suspected that he had received the bitterest shock of his life. He nodded with the same quiet gravity to the receptionist as he entered the office and with his usual brief smile to his secretary. But once in his own room, behind a closed door and seated at his desk, he raised his fingertips gently to his temples and closed his weary eyes. Life, he admitted, was too much for his simple philosophy. One tried to do right and one's wife accused one of spite. One tried to fight wrong, and the enemy turned up after the bout in even richer ermine. Perhaps the lesson of it all was that the
appearances
to which he had so clung, the old family appearances of honor and scrupulousness, of dignity and aristocratic distinction, were, after all, the only things that could be preserved.

He opened his top drawer and drew from it a photograph of a small, high-gabled, gingerbread villa in Newport which had just been left to him by his uncle, Maturin Kip, of whose estate it had been one of the few assets. It was a bit crazy looking and in poor repair, but it had been designed by Richard Upjohn in 1853, and it was unique. Bayard and Peggy had been carefully over their accounts and had reluctantly decided that they were not yet in a position to afford a summer place. But now he decided that they would risk it. They would be Mr. and Mrs. Bayard Kip, of New York and Newport. They would be listed in the summer, as well as the winter, Social Register. And the old house, with a new coat of paint and a well-kept lawn, would be a credit again to Bellevue Avenue.

L
AVINIA
and Chambers Todd had been married for twenty-five years. Almost all of these had been spent in Plandome, Long Island, in two houses, first in a small yellow cube in a development and later in a more pretentious Tudor dwelling in the fashionable residential area. They had been happy, busy years, she taken up with her children and home and he with the demands of his law practice. Life had been too full for them to become too critical of each other. She had taken for granted that behind the dark, stocky figure of her irritable but preoccupied husband there still lurked the boy she had deemed so romantic in their common childhood in Hartford, that with more freedom from the clutching demands of Tower, Tilney & Webb he would have shown the interest in his wife and children of the ideal suburbanite. And he had seemed contented with her neat, chintzy house, her circle of girl friends with whose husbands he sometimes played golf and the decisions (all taken by her) as to the education and social life of the children. Leisure had come, at least to her, as the latter had grown up, but she had managed to use it, in her slow, occasionally clumsy but always determined fashion, in the cultivation of the arts: a French class, a painting class, even a class in current events. Until it had all come abruptly to an end.

For the children, a boy and a girl, had married early and well, and Chambers, who had now risen to the position immediately under the senior partner, announced to Lavinia that they were moving to the city to take a more active part in the social life necessitated by an expanding practice. They rented an apartment on Park Avenue, had it furnished expensively by a decorator, and Lavinia, when they were not giving dinner parties for visiting executives or being entertained themselves at restaurants, found that she had nothing to do. For Chambers this new life seemed the end to which all of their old had been simply the means. For her the means had been enough.

It was not that Chambers expected her to do nothing. Far from it. He expected her to improve her bridge game, to develop a circle of friends from the ranks of the Social Register, to become a member of the Colony Club, in brief, to carry the banner of his law firm into places where men could not penetrate. But it was not merely a question of her own disinclination to do these things; it was one of her actual incapacity. She had been pretty enough and bright enough when she had married Chambers; she had been a Smith graduate, after all, and an English major. But somehow with the years her native enthusiasm had degenerated almost to gushiness, her love of home to a habit of talking too much about her children and her nervous intensity, her most attractive gift, to a near shrillness. The freckled sophomore with the winning smile and scattered blond hair was now a matron of large hips and shoulders (she dieted so desperately that, half starved, she would go on eating benders fatal to her purpose), of hair too often waved and too tightly matted to the scalp, of pale skin and firm, square jaw, of dresses with too many colors and hats with too many flowers, and of the big, blue, frightened eyes of a stubborn child. It was inevitable that, confronted with easy, graceful, harshly laughing Manhattan ladies, her diffidence should be intensified to sullenness.

Chambers was blunt in his criticisms and suggestions. “Stick close to Ada Tilney. She may not seem to have much style, but people respect her, and I'm sure her word at the Colony Club would go a long way. Then there's Peggy Kip. She may be a bit snooty, but she knows everything and everyone in old New York.”

“But I don't care about old New York!” Lavinia protested. “I care about people for what they are, not who they are. Really, Chambers, you're talking like the most awful snob!”

“It has nothing to do with snobbishness,” he retorted testily. “It has to do with the good of the firm.”

“Not just the good of Chambers Todd?”

“Well, I'm a member of the firm, aren't I? Your trouble is that you take everything too hard. That's why you don't get on better at dinner parties. The other night, at the Gages' I saw the men on both sides of you talking the other way.”

“What was I expected to do? Pull them by the ear?”

“If necessary. But I bet you'd bored them to death talking about the children.”

“Well, what's wrong with talking about my children?” Lavinia demanded indignantly. “I'm proud of my children!”

“Yes, but you can't expect other people to be.”

“That fancy Mrs. Newbold you admire so much talks about
her
children. She held forth all night about how unfair it was that her boy was kicked out of St. Mark's!”

“When you occupy a position like Florence Newbold's,” Chambers replied crushingly, “you can talk about anything you want.”

What she could never understand was why
he
got on as well as he did in the world that she found so difficult. He had emerged from a quarter of a century of downtown labor totally ignorant, so far as she could sec, of all fields but law and finance. And even in law, she observed, he had confined himself to the special tools of his corporate practice. She had once read a layman's history of English jurisprudence in the hope of being able to stimulate him to further conversation in their evenings at home, but he had never heard of the Statute of
Quia Emptores
or the Rule in Shelley's case, which the author had seemed to regard as basic. In the arts he lacked even a superficial smattering. Lavinia was convinced that he had never read a play of Shakespeare, unless part of
Julius Caesar
in high school and that he would not have blinked an eye had she told him that
Parsifal
was a symphony by Brahms. Yet he did not hesitate now at parties to wade with big feet into discussions of modern art or poetry and to dilute the thin clear streams of intellect with the dirty water of generality until they were full enough for multitudes to splash about in. “What do you suppose a man thinks about when he paints a picture like that?” Lavinia would hear him across the room, standing before their hostess' Picasso. The heaviness of his approaches was not lightened, either, by his new habit of drinking three cocktails in rapid succession before dinner. After these he tended to become sentimental, his eyes moistened, and he would sometimes place his hand on top of a pretty dinner partner's as he told her of his long hard climb to the altitude where he was privileged to meet such as her. Ugh!

“My goodness, what a handsome husband you have!” women would say to her. “One would never dream he was over fifty.” There would be no comment, of course, about her own appearance giving rise to any such incredulity. “Such dark, ruthless looks. One feels Mr. Todd would be a very just judge but a very stern one. That must be why he understands instinctively so many things he couldn't possibly have had time to study!”

Well, Lavinia could hardly blame them for being taken in by Chambers' looks. She had been herself. There had never been room in her heart for any image but that of the clear-skinned, square-jawed, stiffly muscular high school boy who had supported his mother by working in a bakery at night and who had nearly killed poor Hank Porter for asking for a date with Lavinia Frink. But she doubted that he would have won her so easily had he courted her with the eyes that now beamed at Mrs. Newbold, the eyes of a small boy preparing to blow out a birthday candle.

“He sees through us,” Florence Newbold told Lavinia one night when she had been unable to avoid the boredom of two minutes' talk with her. “He sees through us all!”

In a way it was true. Chambers was shrewd about people. But what was unfathomable to Lavinia was how anyone, having once seen through Mrs. Newbold's set, could want any part of it. All during the Plandome years Chambers had shown a lack of interest in his neighbors and in their trifling advancements, in whether they had one car or two and how soon they could afford a summer cabin in the White Mountains, which she had interpreted as the lofty disregard of the dedicated professional man for the outward indicia of success, a disregard, too, which had seemed to her totally consistent with the unflinching stare of that high school boy's unimpressed eyes. And now it seemed that all the while his scorn of the different gradations of Plandome success had been merely the snobbishness of one who had no intention of remaining there, or, worse, the cautiousness of one who wished to avoid too many Plandome ties that might be troublesome when he had moved to the greater world of East Side Manhattan. And the moist eye, the gesticulating hand, the oddly high, post-cocktail laugh were like those wedding presents that had been considered too grand for the young couple and been put away for twenty-five years to be brought out now, out of date but usable, to adorn the long fancy table whose image, unbeknownst to her, had been fixed in his mind as the goal of a lifetime that she had believed consecrated to more serious things.

She got little enough sympathy from her children. Judith, married in Plandome, was a small, pretty, cool blond version of her father, and she and Chambers liked to play at what sometimes struck Lavinia as a rather cynical pantomime of the close, excluding, American father-daughter relationship.

“You mustn't be jealous of people liking Daddy,” Judith warned her, “or of his wanting to go out more. He's entitled to branch out a bit now. Lord knows, he's worked hard enough for it.”

“But I'm not jealous,” Lavinia protested. “I'm envious. I only wish people liked
me.
How do you suppose he does it?”

“By being big and healthy and outgiving. By being so obviously a man who knows what he's after and gets it.”

“You mean they want to touch him for good luck?”

“You must fight your habit of sarcasm, Mummy,” Judith reproached her. It was amazing, Lavinia reflected, how quickly Judith's bright little box of domestic happiness had isolated her from human sympathy. “If you're bored, you should develop a hobby. Something with your hands is always best. What about those flower paintings you used to do?”

“Oh, Judith, they were terrible!”

“What about pottery, then? Charles has an invalid aunt who can make the most beautiful ash trays you ever saw!”