The Collected Stories of Louis Auchincloss (28 page)

“All handled by you, John,” Hilary pointed out.

“Oh, yes, all handled by me, I admit it,” John rejoined with a rueful, impatient shake of his head. “What is one to do? I practice law in Arnold & Degener at One Chase Manhattan Plaza. Who am I to turn down high-paying clients with legally honest deals? What would my partners say if I did? For Lester pays well—make no mistake. I've never seen him haggle over a bill. He even once sent me a check for double the amount charged with a note that read: ‘I want the best securities lawyer in town, and this is what the best securities lawyer should get.' How many clients do you find who give you that kind of appreciation? Is it
my
job to look out for old mismanaged stores?”

“Of course not,” Townie agreed firmly. “You've got to live in the present. We all do.”

“Not I,” I protested. “I'm an auctioneer. I live in the past and off the past.”

“And as a commentator,” Hilary insisted, “I live off the immediate future.”

John's expression became harder. “I'm not apologizing for myself,” he said, “but neither am I praising myself. I knew what I wanted to be when I was in law school, and I'm only sorry that I can't be it more often. I wanted—and want—to be the kind of lawyer who builds, and Lester's genius was always for destruction. If he pieced together a little railroad empire, it was to close it down in favor of his noisy buses. If he laid his hands on a picturesque country inn, it was to replace it with a cheap motel. And his favorite game was the simple taking over and looting of companies, passing on the empty, glittering shell to the unwary public that thought it was protected by a benevolent government. Sometimes I tried to excuse Lester as a frustrated would-be pioneer who had been born too late. What would Vanderbilt or Rockefeller have done with their energy in our century with the frontiers gone? Might they have not torn each other to bits, like so many Lester Gordons?”

“Is that why Lester turned ultimately on himself?” I asked. “Wasn't there an element of financial suicide in the last debacle?”

“I think there was,” John agreed, nodding. “Lester was tired of having everything give way before him. He may have experienced an odd kind of relief when he batted his head at last against the hard wall of crime and knew that detection was a minute-to-minute possibility. But first I must tell you about Luella. Let the cold Wall Street lawyer tell you boys about love. True love!”

“Oh, come, John,” Hilary protested, “you're not going to try to convince us that Lester was in love with that little tramp.”

“Ah, but I am!” John exclaimed. “Lester was very much in love with that little tramp. Or thought he was, and what's the difference?”

“Lester in love,” Hilary sneered. “It's a contradiction in terms!”

“But Lester is always in love,” John insisted. “And he always was. Lester from the beginning was in love with the whole beautiful world that he wanted to possess. You remember how he was at college: so intense, so interested, always listening, bubbling with curiosity, affectionate, gay? Well, he's still that way, damn him! Lester studied the world because he had to
have
the world. And he had to have it because he loved it.”

“Even when he was block-busting for Huldah's father?”

“Even then. Lester doesn't see things the way other people do. He is so totally devoid of any kind of racial prejudice that it strikes him, when it's stuck in front of his nose, as simply another aspect of the human equation to make money out of. People like mountain scenery, so one buys up mountains. Other people don't want Negro neighbors, so one brings in Negroes to induce them to sell cheap. It's market, pure and simple, the supreme law of the market! Lester, you might even argue, was the last of the pure capitalists. He wants to believe that the best of all possible worlds will materialize if the Lesters are only left free to make their profit.”

“He couldn't!” I exclaimed incredulously.

“I said he
wants
to,” John emphasized. “Of course, he doesn't believe it. Like the rest of us, he sees clearly enough that the world which Lester conquers is an inferior place to the one which Lester assaults. He sees his shoddy houses, his tinsel motels, his soulless stores. He understands that he has made his fortune by swimming in a sea of junk. But hope keeps bubbling. What else keeps him alive? Somewhere, somehow, he has to believe that the brightness and smartness of a good boy like Lester is going to produce something admirable, something permanent, some bit of merchandise that will not fall to pieces before one has got it from the shop down into one's car.”

“And that was Luella?” Hilary exclaimed with a snort.

“That was Luella. Exactly. Luella was beauty and sex and love and ideals, like the advertisement of a new car. Huldah, after all, was a bit of a dog, and Gabrielle, saving your reverence, Townie, was no rose, but every man at this table will have to admit that Luella was a dish.”

“But a dish for the multitude,” Hilary added. “Who has not partaken?”

“Luella was a typically American phenomenon,” John continued, again in his lawyer's voice. “Blond, curved, with pouting lip and bad temper. She was the personification of the
appearance
of sex, the symbol, if you like, of fleshly passion. You might say she was a sort of female Lester, a capitalist in love, who gave the least for the most, who wanted a man's soul in return for a wriggle of her fanny. It's elementary psychology to speculate that she was probably no good in bed.”

“You needn't speculate,” Hilary put in flatly. “I can assure you she was not.”

The rest of us were careful not to give Hilary the satisfaction of so much as a cocked eyebrow. As Townie used to say, given enough rope Hilary would prove every hour on the hour that he was no gentleman.

“Very well, then,” John went on coldly, “we need not speculate. We know. The importance of Luella in American commercial society is not what she gives her possessor, but what people may be induced to believe that she gives. She is as much a status symbol as a Gauguin or a RollsRoyce. Everyone seeing Mrs. Lester Gordon can be counted on to envy Mr. Gordon his nights. If this is so, does it very much matter if they sleep in separate bedrooms?”

“But you said he was in love with Luella,” I protested. “Surely that implies something beyond impressing his neighbors!”

“No, with Lester I honestly believe it does not. Indeed, I suggest that this is of the essence of Lester. He
doesn't
see the difference between the outward and visible sign and the inward and invisible truth. If Luella is sex to the multitude, then Luella is sex to him. When he came to my office to tell me that he wanted to marry Luella, he was so excited that he could not keep still. He kept jumping up and running about the room, playing with the window shade cord, rustling papers, lighting and putting out cigarettes. Luella was a goddess; Luella was Cleopatra; Luella should be a movie star! Huldah, Gabrielle, all the other women in his life, had been mere shadows. With Luella, at last, he was living!”

“Why was he telling
you?”
I inquired, for John seemed an odd confidant in such matters.

“Because I was his lawyer. And he certainly needed one. One doesn't divorce a Drayton with impunity, does one, Townie? Also, Luella had a rather sticky spouse of her own to shed. I tried to sober Lester down by pointing out that of the eight lawyers who would necessarily be involved—four for each party in New York and four more in Reno—he would have to pay at least six, and if Luella's husband was angry enough, all eight. But nothing bothered him. He was in euphoria! ‘I don't care what it costs,' he told me. ‘I've got to have my Luella!'”

“How did Luella feel about him?” Townie asked. “Or was it simply a question of dough?”

“Oh, Luella liked him well enough. To marry him for a few years, anyway. I don't suppose even Lester expected that she would be capable of the smallest sacrifice in this respect. I know he was not surprised when she threw him over at the first hint of trouble. But he was a big spender who loved late hours and nightclubs: Luella's ideal of a man. And he was willing to take on the trouble and expense of her own divorce—oh, he was worth it. So Arnold & Degener went to work to clear away the legal underbrush that stood between the union of these two passionate lovers.”

“I hope you're not referring to my poor little innocent cousin Gabrielle as legal underbrush,” Townie intervened with a chuckle.

John flung up his hands. “When it comes to settlements, I'd rather fight a blond gold-digger from the Follies than a brownstone miss from old New York,” he emphasized. “When your poor little innocent cousin was through with us, she had clear title to the whole Drayton Gardens project!”

“And I'm happy to tell you that the first thing she did was to re-christen it Queen's Gardens,” Townie informed us in all earnestness. “I'm glad to say that the family name is no longer associated with that dump.”

“Only the family income,” Hilary retorted.

“What a pity,” I added, “that Gabrielle's delicacy in nomenclature could not restore the family landmark.”

Townie merely grunted as John continued: “Negotiations went on for months. Luella's husband had to be squared as well, for it turned out that he was shattered at the idea of losing
his
status symbol, or at least of losing her to Lester. When the agreements were all signed, Gabrielle insisted that Lester and not she have the bother of going to Reno, although she knew that he was in the midst of the biggest proxy fight in his life and from which she stood to profit: the battle for Atlantic Enterprises.” John paused and looked around the table. “But you all know about Atlantic Enterprises?”

“No, John,” I answered, “we don't. Or at least I don't. Please remember that we're not all lawyers.”

“Atlantic,” he continued, “is a holding corporation that controls a string of department stores, a bus line, a theater chain and some three dozen parking lots, all just outside the city limits. Lester was already president of the company, but he wanted control. He had a Napoleonic scheme of uniting Atlantic to his other interests, and to some further ones that he had in mind to acquire, in order to spread a belt around the city. He saw that New York was sliding into poverty and despair and that the middle and upper classes, together with most of the businesses, were fleeing to the suburbs. Out of this hegira Lester would make himself lord of the future. He would put himself in a position where all the insoluble growing problems of our time—overpopulation, racial strife and the growing indigence in the city—would operate to fill his pocketbook. How could he lose? As he once told me: ‘Only an ass can be poor these days.' And I really believe that he might have achieved his goal had he been able to be in New York continuously during the battle. His particular kind of genius required him to be always on the scene. But in the hottest part of the fight he was stuck in Reno, having to check in at court every other day to establish his residence. He had a jet plane in which he tore back and forth through the ether. Never shall I forget the picture of that desperate little man, living on benzedrine, a telephone constantly cradled to his ear, talking, shouting, laughing. For that was the thing about Lester: he was actually enjoying the whole thing. And when I think what he was
doing
all the time, the risks that he was taking, when I think that he knew all along what was hanging over his head, I cannot decide whether he is the bravest man I ever knew or a simple lunatic!”

“But
what
was he doing?” I demanded.

“Man, didn't you read the papers? The market had broken, money was tight, and Lester was always a borrower up to the hilt. I could not imagine where he was getting the money to buy Atlantic stock. I did not find out until Lester's house of cards fell in that he had been using Atlantic's treasury to buy Atlantic stock.”

“And that was wrong?” I asked. “Wasn't he president of Atlantic?”

“Small wonder that morals are on the slide,” John answered with a snicker, “when the public no longer knows what's right or wrong. Perhaps it's not the public's fault. Perhaps our laws are too complicated. But in this case it would be simple enough even for you, Roger, to understand. The officers of a corporation are not supposed to use its assets for their personal market speculations. Even when they claim, as Lester did, that they are supporting the price of the company stock. But Lester's luck had run out at last. It was no fault of his that he encountered the worst stock market slide since 1929. It was a brief one, but it did for Lester. He ran short of money before he had completed his control of Atlantic, and that was the end. In a single day everyone turned on him. He lost his companies, he lost his reputation, and, needless to say, he lost Luella. In fact, on the rainy morning when he donned dark glasses and boarded the plane for Lisbon, he was not even divorced from Gabrielle.”

“So he's still your cousin, Townie,” Hilary observed dryly.

“No, Gabrielle went out to Reno after he absconded and got the decree herself,” Townie hastened to inform us. “I advised her to do it. How much of what Lester settled on her she will be able to keep is a moot question, but you'll be glad to know she's got a crack lawyer.”

Hilary and John and I burst out laughing at the idea of our being “glad” to know this, and Townie's cheeks reddened.

“Speaking of lawyers,” I said, turning back to John, “do you still represent Lester?”

“No, I had to give him up. You see, Arnold & Degener are general counsel to Atlantic, and there was an obvious conflict.”

“You mean,” Hilary put in quickly, “that having to choose between two clients, you kept the best?”

“Not at all,” John retorted indignantly. “You don't understand these things, Hilary, and you shouldn't be so smart about them. We dropped Lester because he had deceived us. That was not true of Atlantic.”