Diary of a Yuppie (7 page)

For example, Audrey the other day wanted me to read a blotchy one-page paper that she had written for school on Pizarro and the Incas. I knew that she only wanted my approval. I have learned that in homework children wish the parents either to do it for them or praise what they have done. I'm afraid I did neither.

"I've never seen why explorers get so much space in history books," I said. "If they hadn't got where they got, someone else would have, the very next year."

"Miss Lake doesn't care about explorers. She calls them 'exploiters.' She says what Pizarro did to the Incas was cold-blooded murder."

"But that's the way the Spaniards did things. If Miss Lake doesn't like it, why does she want to read about it?"

"Because it's history, Daddy! And she teaches history. That's her job."

"Well, I don't believe in making snap judgments about historical figures. You weren't there. You don't know all the facts. Or even a fraction of them."

Audrey was as pretty as her mother, but her nature was conventional and little open to new ideas. Sally, her junior by two years, was square-headed and down to earth.

"There's no point talking to Daddy about homework," she said flatly. "He doesn't think like the teachers."

I usually manage to be out of the apartment when Alice comes; our talks are few and brittle. She tells me that her literary agency business is going well and that she needs nothing. This probably means that her parents are helping her. I am beginning to realize that I shall have to pay her something if she stays away permanently, but I am still betting that she will be forced to return. I know that her parents cannot afford to support her indefinitely.

My mother has now settled the matter. When I came home last night I found her in quiet charge of the apartment and the girls peacefully eating their supper.

"Leave them be, Bob," she said firmly. "Mix yourself a drink and listen to your old ma."

Mother, so forceful, yet so thin and plain and gray and somehow immortal, never subject to weather, time or emotion! I have always thought of her as weighing me in the balance and finding me wanting, perhaps because I seemed somehow to threaten Father, or at least her image of him. Yet I never feel that she disapproves of me, or even that she does not love me. It is more as if I were in some strange fashion too much for her and that she has always been fair enough to blame herself for this more than she does me. I have perplexed her, but is that, her troubled look seems to ask, my fault?

"The way you're living is no way to live. You can't look after the girls and work the hours you do. You've got to let Alice come back and live in this apartment while you get a room somewhere."

"But this is my home, Ma!"

"Alice is a bargain. She'll look after the girls and the apartment for free. You'll save money on a housekeeper. And you needn't worry about the legal angles. Your father, at Alice's insistence, has drawn up a document by which she waives any rights against you for leaving this apartment and renounces all claims to alimony. He hated to do it, but she made him. So you see, nobody's trying to trick you out of anything. We just want to get on with our lives, that's all."

I felt that I was being put in a very shabby position. Everyone else, it was being made to appear, cared only for the welfare of my daughters while I was standing on a bundle of petty legal rights. And yet I was being quietly done out of my home, wife and offspring!

"I don't see what right Alice has, deserting me, to expect such favorable treatment."

"She has no rights. She's not expecting anything. I'm the one who's arranged it all. I've talked to the girls, and they want their mother back. They love you, Bob, but you're never home."

"Is that my fault?"

"Fault? Oh, you lawyers! Look here, my child. You're up against four women, and you haven't a chance. Do what you're told and be thankful."

Mother had a point. I was licked, and I guess I was glad to be licked. Today I moved to the Stafford, and Alice came back to the apartment. I suppose it may be a relief at last to be able to devote all my time to my firm. God knows it needs it. And the acrimony between Alice and me is now much reduced. Having her back in the apartment may pave the way for our reunion.

I
T HAS NOW BEEN
six months since I made the last entry in my journal. Managing a successful and rapidly growing law firm has taken most of my time, the bulk of my energy and just about all that has been left of my heart. At this writing we are seventeen partners and thirty-nine associates, and we have to take additional space. With a couple of years' hard work and a continuation of my lucky streak we should become one of the major corporate law firms in the city. Stranger things have happened.

It has not been easy, nor has it been without the shattering effects on my personal life to which I will duly advert. The main trouble, in the office, has been in establishing myself as the administrative head of the firm. The crying need for a strong executive is not always recognized by lawyers. There is still some survival of the old-fashioned notion that a "real" lawyer will be so absorbed in his practice that he will tend to be restless at any administrative restrictions imposed by his office. Lawyers who despise problems of management as petty and distracting invariably regard themselves as having a larger vision and greater souls than those who do not. In sober truth they are more apt to be selfish prima donnas, indifferent to the suffering and inconvenience to their staff caused by chaos in maintenance.

Glenn Deane was my principal opponent in this. He has sought to establish his own little firm within a firm, treating his "faithful" junior partners and clerks to limousines and first-class air tickets, allowing them to keep irregular hours and, worst of all, surrounding himself with a miniature court that laughs appreciatively at his sneering cracks at "drill sergeant Bob Service" who wants to convert a group of "liberal philosophers" into "goose-stepping Prussians." I have argued with him again and again, but he only laughs at me—or worse, promises me reforms that he has no intention of making.

I never make the mistake, as he does, of neglecting my relations with my partners, even the youngest. The associates I can afford to treat impersonally, with simple good manners, as it is never too late to cultivate the small number of them who will eventually be made members of the firm. Indeed, there may even be an advantage in the sudden offer of intimacy by the senior partner who has, until one's day of grace, seemed a remote figure. But with the actual partners I cultivate a near intimacy, taking them regularly to lunch, one by one, and inquiring into their problems, legal and domestic. I am counting on this to stand me in good stead in any showdown with Deane.

That such a showdown is on its way seems inevitable after what occurred at our first formal office dinner. We had taken a private dining room at the University Club for a party that included all partners and associates, together with their spouses or guests. Alice, you may be surprised to hear, was my "spouse" for the occasion.

She and I have been on much more friendly terms of late. On two occasions we have taken the girls out to Keswick for Sunday lunch, once with my parents and once with hers, and we have occasionally walked in the park with them on Saturday afternoons. Ours has become what is called a "civilized" separation, which means, I trust, that it will eventually end—at least when Alice comes to her senses. She has even helped with the arrangements for the office party, ordering the menu and the flowers and seating the dinner tables.

Her kindness, however, had to be used for her husband's benefit that night, for Deane, who had had, as usual, too many drinks, poked odious fun at my speech. I had tried to sound a serious note:

"A party like this should be a fun occasion, of course, but there's no law that says we cease to be good fellows if we have a moment of seriousness. So bear with me while I say this. We are a young firm. Our oldest lawyer is only thirty-seven. We haven't the 'advantage' of bad portraits of bearded forebears or medallions over the drinking fountains offering us samples of the wisdom of the past. But for that very reason we should remind ourselves from time to time that we are still parts of a great tradition. I have spoken to many of you about the hypocrisy of some older members of the bar who orate about public service as they pocket big fees, but that needn't mean that public service doesn't exist or that we can't be a part of it. I intend that we shall do our part in
pro bono
work. I expect us all to live up to the ideals we have inherited."

"Fortunately, we don't pay taxes on that kind of inheritance!"

Enough had been drunk so that even the more discreet associates laughed at Deane's barked interjection.

"All laughing aside," I retorted in a dry tone that partially restored the silence of the chamber, "I think it is necessary to recall these things, banal as it may sound. For we should be an instrument of justice as well as the servant of those who retain us, officers of the bar as well as spokesmen for business. The greatest law firms of this city stand for more than the roster of their clients, and I'll be damned if I don't live to see our firm become as great as any!"

"Our managing partner," Glenn now exclaimed, jumping to his feet amid the applause that followed my remarks, "has just seen fit to damn himself! For was it not precisely the turgid pomposity of the so-called great law firms that we pledged ourselves to break away from? And was it Bob Service, the lofty seeker of the eternal verities in the cerulean sky, whom we followed or the agile Bob who knew just when to place his dagger between the shoulder blades of Branders Blakelock?"

This, too, was greeted with some laughs, but they were nervous laughs. Everyone in that room could now feel that ours was no friendly argument.

"That's not a matter for levity!" I called out angrily.

"No, of course not. I crave your pardon for violating the Robert Service law of gravity!"

Alice after dinner came over to me and hooked her arm under mine to lead me away from the others.

"What an utter bastard Glenn is," she murmured in my ear. "Poor Bob, you were trying so hard. Maybe a bit too hard."

I was sore and angry that it should be so obvious that I needed sympathy, but it was still something to have Alice on my side. There was a feeling in her tone that made me want to ask why I should care what anyone thought about anything so long as she was with me.

"How about lunching with me tomorrow?" I asked her. "Do you realize you've never even seen my new offices?"

"I think I'd like that, Bob. Yes, I think I really would."

Now that it is beginning to look as if Alice might be thinking of coming back to me, I find myself a bit cooler in assessing her character. It is not that I don't want her back; I do. But I must be consistent with my long-held resolution of seeing things straight.

Alice is a wonderful woman, perhaps even a great one. She is large of spirit, generous and fine. Wherever you tap her with your hammer she rings true. My parents, who are also to some extent "true blues," though made of coarser material, instinctively appreciate her and take her side against their own child. But the essential difference between her and me is not that I am less pure, less "good" than she—although I might be willing to concede this—but that she will not recognize in her own nature the spots and warts that I admit, however reluctantly, in my own.

If "good people" are those who think they are good and "bad people" are those who know they are bad, then the election between souls that are saved and souls that are damned becomes as arbitrary as any conceived by the Jansenists of old. There is no real reason that with better "public relations" I should not appear as noble a character as Alice.

For could I not have shown up Glenn Deane as motivated by near lunatic jealousy of my success? And wasn't he? And could I not have presented Branders Blakelock as a Dracula who sucks the life blood of handsome young clerks? And isn't he? And might I not have won Alice back by falling on my knees before her, like Richard of York, and declaring that I had eviscerated my old firm for her sake? And, in a way, hadn't I? Who would benefit more than she by my greater revenues?

At Columbia I wrote a term paper on the novels of Dame Ivy Compton-Burnett. That marvelous old maid conceived of humanity as divided into sheep and goats, the former a submissive passive majority and the latter a shrill dominating minority. The sheep have only their wit and irony with which to resist the tyranny of the latter, but this sometimes suffices, as the pompous goats are extremely sensitive to ridicule. What I learned from Dame Ivy is that human beings may be milder and more tepid than their supposed counterparts in heroic fiction and drama, and that, like the lower animals, they run truer to type than idealists suppose. If I am to be a goat, I must not allow the barbs of the silly sheep to destroy me.

Yet Alice, sitting before the desk in my new office the next day, before we went to lunch, seemed quite unprepared with barbs. She was unstinting in her praise of my pale yellow walls, my emerald-green carpet, my eight large flower prints.

"They're Thorntons, aren't they?"

Indeed they were. I was surprised at her perspicacity, but when pictures had a literary flavor she was apt to be on target. I loved these romantic prints. The corollas of the flowers were huge and brilliant, like the heads of beautiful, dangerous women, and the landscapes were distant panoramas, adapted to the supposed moods of the plants. A poisonous arum was seen before a rainstorm breaking over gray, craggy peaks, roses grew before the backdrop of a ruined temple, some eighteenth-century
folie,
and the night-blooming cereus exploded as in fire before a Gothic church outlined in the moonlight. What was I but a humble mortal before the glorious carnivorous plant of the law? Behind my desk I had hung the sacred Egyptian lotus, an explosion of golden petals dominating a distant dim desert where small pyramids, symbols of death, were arranged.

"You may ask why I put flowers in a law office," I said. "It's because they are my idea of what is at once civilized and savage."