Manhattan Monologues (21 page)

And now, due no doubt to the high pitch of his resentment of the man who had betrayed his favorite daughter—and her father, too, oh, yes, himself as well—a fourth Arnold Dillard was emerging, a grotesque caricature of the horrid little whispering spy, a shrill hyena accusing the first two Dillards of playing God and Satan in their own Paradise Lost. Was he having a true nervous breakdown at long last?

He recalled with a searing clarity the image of the twenty-three-year-old Rodman Jessup who had first applied for a job at Dillard Kaye in the fall of 1935. Under the high-standing, wavy blond hair was a beautiful boyish face, the face of a fine clean youth, a kind of all-American cartoon. Yet the blue-gray eyes had a mature and rather fixed stare, and one felt that the muscular, well-shaped body under the tight white spotless summer suit would respond instantly to anything those eyes saw as needing correction.

Arnold had been half-apologetic about the exiguous salary then offered.

"That's all right, sir," was the prompt response. "I'm looking for opportunity rather than remuneration. I've had to work my way through Columbia College and Law School, so I know how to live on a shoestring. And if I may say so, sir, it was hearing you speak at law school commencement last year that made me apply here first. I liked the way you put the high role that lawyers can play in our business system."

Arnold looked at him carefully for a moment. "My daughter Lavinia is a friend of yours, I believe."

"I am honored if she so describes me, sir. But I wasn't going to mention her."

Of course, Rod was promptly hired. He had been editor-in-chief of his law journal and was clearly a "catch." And what, of course, clinched the matter was that Vinnie had confided in her father (though not in her mother, she flatteringly assured him, and certainly not in Rodman) her fixed determination to marry this young man.

Arnold had succumbed to the somewhat perverse temptation to submit this self-assured intruder into his family midst to the toughest office test, so he assigned the new recruit to the job of acting as his principal assistant in the most complicated of corporate reorganizations. Rod had been extraordinary. He toiled away, night and day, even sleeping on a couch in the law library, until he mastered every detail of the massive transaction with a clarity of mind and an organizing capability that had astonished and delighted his new boss. When the job was finished, Arnold took him out to a Lucullan dinner at the most expensive French restaurant in town, where, he was pleased to note, his guest partook freely of three famous wines without slurring a syllable.

As they sat over their cognac afterward, Arnold embarked on a more personal note. "Well, my boy, now you've had a glimpse of what a corporate law practice is all about, I daresay it strikes a young idealist like yourself as something a bit dustier than you'd expected. Even a bit grubbier. Isn't that so? You know the poem about the young Apollo, tiptoe on the verge of strife? How does it go? 'Magnificently unprepared for the long littleness of life'? Well, I suppose the 'magnificently' is something."

"But the details are nothing, sir, if the whole is good."

"You find a corporate reorganization good? You interest

"Isn't it part of the social machinery designed to get us out of this Depression? How can that not be good?

"Well, you might argue that in the matter we've just finished. But I'm afraid, my friend, you'll find that some reorganizations have no purpose loftier than to establish the control of one set of pirates over another."

Arnold, facing the cool responding stare of those blue-gray eyes, felt almost ashamed of himself. What was he doing now, old ham that he was, but trying to astonish a young man with the broad reach of his mind into the bottom as well as the top of a law practice?

"But those things are going to be done anyway, sir" was Rod's sturdy reply. "And, as I see it, it's our job to make sure that they are done efficiently and legally. In a democracy, and in a free market, or as free as practicable, we have to let businessmen and capitalists to some extent work things out their own way. But as lawyers we can see that they work it out strictly within the law. It doesn't so much matter
what
they do as long as everyone can see it. Then, if laws have to be changed, the voters will know what to change."

Arnold nodded, musingly. "Which means that a lawyer doesn't really need a conscience at all?"

"Or the highest and most sensitive kind. Like yours, sir."

This had all been very gratifying, and the young man was evidently sincere, if almost too much so. It had not taken more than a few months before it was recognized by all twenty partners and sixty clerks of the firm that young Jessup had been enlisted among the small group of selected associates who worked almost exclusively for the senior partner. Within a year he became Arnold's son-in-law, and in another five he was made the youngest of his partners. A tour of naval duty in the Pacific war only added to his luster, and he and Vinnie, neighbors of her parents in town and tenants of a cottage on the latters' estate in Glenville, became as essential to Arnold's family as they were to his law practice. Even Vinnie's younger sisters adored their handsome and intriguingly serious brother-in-law and sought his approval of their boyfriends.

There were times when Arnold liked to think of himself as an aging Hadrian leaning on the sturdy shoulders of a stalwart Antinoüs, on whose total fidelity he could confidently rely to help him bear the burdens of the empire. But there were also moments when he was subject to the uncomfortable suspicion that his protégé was gaining control of his inner being and becoming as much a guide as a support. If there was the hint of a fanatic in Rod, there might also be the hint of a fanatic's strength.

When a vacancy on the Appellate Division prompted gossip that the governor might appoint Arnold to the seat, he discussed the situation candidly with Rod over lunch at the Downtown Association.

"But what would happen to the firm?" the latter expostulated in dismay.

"Oh, it would get along. Nobody's indispensable. And there's a side of me that would like the chance to philosophize a bit about the law. As judges can. I like to see our law as a continuing process. I want to trace our notions back to the old writs in common law."

"How many judges do that?"

"Well, call me Oliver Wendell Holmes, damn it all! Call me Cardozo! Can't there be anything in my life but Dillard Kaye? Must I go to my grave representing more or less flawed characters? I want a moment of truth. Shining truth!"

"But that's precisely what you have!" Rod exclaimed, almost fiercely. "You've forged this great law firm as your tool. Or, rather, as your shining sword. You say you're not indispensable to it, but I claim you are. There's not another firm in town with our unity, our ésprit de corps. Every one of your partners feels it is as much his club, his school, his church, I might almost say, as his business association."

Arnold at this chose to conclude the discussion, and, anyway, the governor didn't appoint him. But there was a kernel of truth in what Rod had said about the firm. Arnold
had
created a tight unit. Partners were always chosen from the associates, never brought in from the outside. There were no branch offices, even in Washington or Paris. Profits were divided evenly among the partners, varying only according to years of service. Arnold himself, it was true, received a considerably larger share as general manager, but only through the unanimous vote of the partnership, with him abstaining.

But really abstaining? Had he not known perfectly what they were up to? Had he not known that the firm was his? Had he not known that the biggest clients were all his, and that, however benevolent, however unchallenged, however assured of the united support of his nineteen cohorts, he was still a despot? And was his occasional restiveness not possibly evidence of a hidden fear that Rod Jessup was grooming himself for the successorship?

And, indeed, only a few months before the dreadful event of the flaunted adultery, came the one serious row in Arnold's halcyon relationship with his son-in-law.

The final settlement of the estate of a rich client of Arnold's was being held up pending the outcome of a suit brought by the widow of the caretaker of the decedent's Long Island estate for a bequest to her late husband of $50,000, which the executors had refused to pay on the grounds that both men were drowned when their fishing boat on Long Island Sound capsized and that there was no evidence that the caretaker had survived his employer.

Rod had marched into Arnold's office one morning and placed his determined features between his father-in-law and the breathtaking view of the harbor.

"Of course, trusts and estates are not my business, sir, but I couldn't help hearing about the Martin case. It can't be true that you aren't going to pay that poor woman the legacy to her husband!"

"My dear boy," Arnold retorted a bit testily, "that is a matter for the executors, not for counsel, to decide. And even if trusts and estates are not your field, surely you must recall from your law school days that fiduciaries need pay only what the law requires them to pay."

"Of course, but surely the widow, who takes the residuary estate outright, as I understand it, can be advised to pay the legacy."

"I am not in the habit of advising my clients as to their moral duties."

"Couldn't you break your habit? Certainly in a case as flagrant as this one?"

Arnold felt a sudden constriction around his heart. "Aren't you being the least bit impertinent?"

Rod flushed. "I'm sorry, sir. I forgot myself."

"I will tell you this, my lad. If it will make things any easier for you. Mrs. Martin is a bitter woman. The autopsy showed that both men had been drinking heavily. She believes that it was the caretaker who brought the whiskey along in the boat and was responsible for the disaster."

A long pause followed, during which Rod paced the floor, evidently seeking to assess this information. At last he paused and faced Arnold. "Only one more question, sir. Do you agree with Mrs. Martin that the caretaker was responsible?"

Arnold was about to answer that he neither knew nor cared and that it was not his or his son-in-law's business to look into the matter further, but, somewhat to his own surprise, his reply was much milder. "As a matter of fact, I don't agree with her. Oliver Martin had been drinking for years, and it's much more probable that the unfortunate caretaker was told to bring the booze and almost forced to drink it with his boss."

"You won't tell Mrs. Martin that?"

"And lose the estate? For she's a mean one. Dream on!"

"What's an estate to a principle?"

Arnold was about to shout at him, to call him a madman, to tell him to get out of his office, when something in the glittering eyes of the young man stopped him. He thought of him suddenly as a Blake watercolor, naked, shining, an Apollo with raised arms and golden hair. Who was this young man, anyway? What was he?

"All right, Rod. I
will
tell her."

His son-in-law's smile was radiant. "I knew you would, sir. I never doubted it. I never doubted you."

Arnold talked to the widow Martin that evening, calling at her house at a time when he knew a cocktail would soften her jagged edges. She was nasty about the whole thing, but she agreed to pay half the legacy in a proposed settlement, and she did not fire her counsel.

It so happened that Rod left the next week for a protracted business trip, so Arnold did not have the opportunity to discuss again the Martin case with him before the explosion of the news of his brazen adultery.

So far as Arnold could recall there had never been a crisis in his life where he had been so hard put to bring the diverse elements of his wrath and consternation into any kind of coherent order. The great decisions of his life had always been made with gravity and calm. When he married, for example, he had been perfectly aware of the different motivations that had impelled him to select Eleanor Shattuck as his mate. He had weighed her modest physical attractions, her dry wit, her adequate dowry and her Boston blue blood against her diminutive stature, her biting sarcasm and her total failure to be impressed by his legal achievements. She had married him, he clearly saw and appreciated, for love alone, the constant and unarticulated love of a New England maid of ancient lineage who hadn't a romantic bone in her body. Why, then, could he not get to the root of the fury that Rod's betrayal aroused in him? Or was the answer that he
could
get to its root? His anger, he reluctantly conceded to himself, was not on behalf of his daughter or of his granddaughters or even, as he liked to think, on behalf of his firm. It was on behalf of himself alone.

Now what did this mean? Of course, he knew what it would mean to a slyly smiling, lewdly winking world. It would mean that his feeling for Rod was a homosexual obsession, and that his private image of himself as Hadrian and Rod as the beloved Antinoüs was only too exact. Yet he had never been conscious of a desire for any kind of physical intimacy with the young man; he had never even so much as patted him on the back. Of course, he had read too much not to be aware of the powers of repression that can drive such impulses even from the conscious mind, but if they are that deeply hidden, can they really be said to exist? He had preferred to see himself as an ancient Greek of the highest Socratic type whose sensual needs were satisfied by women but whose spiritual ones craved the company of idealistic younger men. He had even liked the idea, rather fancied himself in the role.

He found some consolation in talking over the problem of how to handle Rod with the only person in the office who seemed to have all its threads in hand. Harry Hammersly was almost Rod's equal in brilliance, a seemingly confirmed bachelor and the intimate friend of both Rod and Vinnie. His tall, straight figure, square brow and black shiny hair might have suggested a formidable virility had his air not been mitigated by a self-deprecating smile, too much hearty laughter at the jokes of others and a conversational habit of self-mockery.