Powers of Attorney (20 page)

“Well, thanks, Mr. Brooks,” Tomkins would be saying as he got up from his chair. “And now, if I may take the will, I needn't intrude on your time any further.”

“My time is your time, my boy. Any time an old man can be of help.”

It did seem to be working out. Even the file clerks recognized that Mr. Brooks had a new importance in the office. Miss Gibbon had to see that no signed will was placed in the vault until a copy with Mr. Brooks' initials had been affixed to the record file, and she enforced the rule with her usual rigidity. Sometimes at partners' lunches lie told stories now, to the general amusement, of typographical errors and curious clauses, and occasionally a group of two or three clerks, passing his door on the way to lunch, would ask him to join them. At home Mrs. Brooks and Angelina listened with a new attention as he described the personalities of the young men. Brooks began to wonder, like Rabbi Ben Ezra, if the best was not yet to be. But the concept of “best” instantly suggested its opposite, and didn't his present situation provide just the atmosphere to materialize the ancient specter of his still unmade blunder? Perhaps it had waited all these years to make its grim visit to Brooks, the arbiter.

His craft had soon glided over the shallow waters of the initial documents to the murky depths of those succeeding. He was staggered by the “marital deduction” wills with their elaborate mathematical formulae and found himself covering scratch paper with numerators and denominators and running to his old friends, the accountants, for help. Even if not responsible for taxes, he had to be able to read the instrument. And then came a collection of interlocking trusts, created by a rich Hungarian refugee family. Brooks would never have believed that laymen could have imagined such a medley of contingencies, each one to be met with a different scheme. And on top of these came a will whose residuary clause divided the estate into two hundred parts, some in trust, some outright gifts, some gifts to charity, some to charitable trusts. He began to realize that the first two months of his apprenticeship must have been a period of unprecedented lull in the manufacture of the more usual type of Tower, Tilney documents.

He tried to conceal his fear of complexity behind a philosophy of simplicity. “It's one thing to write these wills," he would tell the young men who came to his office. “It's another thing to administer them. Have you thought of that? All right, suppose you
do
save a few thousand bucks in taxes. Aren't you adding it right back to the costs of administration?” But the young men did not seem to think so. They listened politely enough, but they would always insist that what the client wanted the client should get. Brooks had the uneasy feeling that they knew he found it difficult to keep up with them and knew, too, that they had only to appeal to the partner in charge if he refused to sign. And so, grumbling, he signed.

Once, however, he made a stand. It was over the will of an old maid who wanted to divide her estate among her nephews and nieces in such a way as to make them, taking into account the private resources of each at the time of her death, of equal wealth. The will was a prodigy of ingenuity, but repulsively difficult to read. It bristled with rules and equations. How much, for example, did one debit a nephew who had a trust fund, as opposed to one who was a partner in a law firm, or who ran a small business? Brooks took the will home to Staten Island over the weekend and puzzled in vain over its tortured language while the women of his family worked on their needlepoint. On Monday morning he gathered up the bits and pieces of his atrophied courage and flung them in the face of the frowning young associate who had prepared the instrument.

“I'm afraid I can't put my initials on your masterpiece,” he said, with what he hoped was his nicest smile. “Perhaps you deserve an honorary degree from Harvard for creative imagination. It's a fantastic job you've done here, and I give you full marks. But I can't get away from the fact that it's an invitation to a lawsuit. I'll bet this will would have to be construed a dozen times!”

“But I maintain it's entirely clear, sir.”

“You
do, of course. But what about the nephews and nieces?”

The associate shrugged and left, and Brooks next heard of the matter when he was summoned to the senior partner's office. Tilney had the disputed will before him and a pad on which he had jotted some figures. He smiled as he looked up at Brooks.

“This will of Miss Shepard's is something, isn't it? I've been checking it out, though, and it seems to work. Did you think it wouldn't?”

“I don't say it isn't accurately drawn,” Brooks answered quietly, hoping with soft speech and firm manner to convey the impression that he, too, had been able to check it out. “But when you've played around with wills as long as I have, Clitus, you know that complexity spells trouble.”

“I thought just the opposite was the case,” Tilney insisted unexpectedly. “I thought it was the simple, homedrawn will that ended up in court. There's nothing wrong with complexity if the draftsman knows what he's doing. And I suggest that this draftsman does. In fact, I intend to keep an eye on this young man. Now the wisdom of the will is another matter. But we can't control that. If Miss Shepard wants to do this kind of thing with her property, that's Miss Shepard's privilege. And why should we complain? She pays us. If every client wanted an all-to-my-widow will, they'd soon start using stationery store forms.”

“But even so, Clitus, it seems to me there are limits.”

“Everything has limits,” Tilney said in the sharper tone that he used when a subordinate failed to take the proferred “easy out.” “But I fail to see that they have been reached here. It takes time and effort to understand a document like this, but I think you will find that if you take that time and make that effort, it will become clear.”

Brooks rose quickly and took his pen from his upper vest pocket. “I
have
taken that time, Clitus, and I have made that effort. My objections were all in principle, but as you're the final judge of that, I withdraw them.” He smiled down at the senior partner as if they were adjusting a minor matter. “Let me put my John Henry on that document here and now.”

As he leaned over to scratch his initials in the margin, he knew by Tilney's grunt that all was well again. Well between them, perhaps, but with a stifled sigh he knew that all would never be well again inside himself. For he had placed the approving “S.B.” at last on a paper that he did not begin to understand. It could only be a matter of time now before Nemesis struck.

He was never sure whether the change in his office status that followed this episode was real or imagined. Had the word got about among the clerks that old Brooks had been peremptorily overruled by Mr. Tilney and that henceforth one had only to cough significantly if he withheld his initials? Or was it merely his own abashment at realizing that he had been caught out in laziness and timidity and had ignorantly approved a will that might as well have been written in Chinese? Were the associates frankly bored now when he stopped in their offices to chat or was he simply more conscious of those drumming fingers, that eye on the clock? Surely, it was a fact that the documents for his approval were more often sent to his desk now by messenger than personally delivered. And surely it was another fact that if he was in a clerk's office and the telephone rang, the clerk no longer told his caller: “I'll ring you back.” Was he more boring, more contemptible? Or was it rather that terrible thing about old age, that everyone expected one to be boring and hence one was? Just as they expected one to forget everything or to be deaf. Brooks, whose hearing was unusually acute, suffered increasingly from a world that shouted at him. But his only answer to the real or imagined sneers, the true or Active yawns was to redouble his efforts to be agreeable, to smile more broadly at the clerks, to laugh more loudly at the jokes at the partners' lunches, to put an occasional flower on the desks of the senior ladies of the staff. He began to be as jaunty and twinkly as an old vaudeville actor.

The outward expression, however, was not the sign of any inward truth. Behind the rumbling laugh, the oft cleared throat, the anecdote of the glorious past, lay the old dread, intensified, close to panic, relieved only by periods of damp, dull resignation. The mistake would happen soon enough; the law of chances alone decreed it. A good third of the instruments that he now meekly initialed contained clauses that he no longer even pretended to himself that he understood. When he asked a draftsman to explain, he would concentrate so hard on his own expression of intelligent listening that he would forget to listen, and when he asked questions, he was apt to be silenced by the answer: “But, Mr. Brooks, aren't
you
meant to be the expert on that?”

At night he often lay awake and tried to visualize the different ways in which disaster might strike. It would be a will in which the percentage shares of the residuary estate were found to total more than a hundred. It would be a trust where the remainder vested in a dead person. There would be angry voices and pointing fingers, and the initials “S.B.” on the guilty copy in the files would be the death warrant from which there was no appeal. Ah, well, he sometimes thought, as he wiped the cold drops from his forehead, it might even be a relief to have it over.

 

When it came at last, it came with an awesome simplicity. Old Titus Baxter died, and in his will he exercised a power of appointment, conferred upon him by his long deceased mother's will, to prolong a trust for the lifetime of his daughter. It was not one of the complex wills that Brooks had so feared; it was, on the contrary, one of the simple ones that he had applauded. The trouble was that the daughter had been born
after
her grandmother's death. This small basic fact, known to all—apparent, indeed, by the very recitals in Titus' will—had, incredibly enough, been overlooked by the drafting clerk, the senior associate, the partner in charge, and, in the end, by Sylvester Brooks. The exercise of the power had necessarily failed, and a quarter of a million dollars now tumbled, “in default of a valid appointment,” into the lap of old Mrs. Baxter's unsuspecting but grateful pet charity, the Institute for the Relief of Indigent Descendants of American Revolutionary Officers. It was a mistake that any law student, working in the office for a summer salary would have been expected to pick up. It was indeed a grave question whether Miss Baxter did not have a suit against the firm for malpractice. Only the large bequests to her in other articles of the will might incline her to mercy.

Brooks first learned about it on Monday morning from Morris Madison, the partner in charge of the Baxter estate. The invalidity had been pointed out late Friday by the executor, Standard Trust Company, and Madison had spent the weekend in the office with a team of associates, frantically digging out the law to see if anything could be done to save Miss Baxter's trust. Nothing could. Madison seemed tired, but resigned.

“I thought you'd better hear about it from me before the partners' lunch,” he told Brooks. “Of course, we're all to blame, but the major blame is mine. Some harsh things will undoubtedly be said, and I suggest we sit together, and you let me answer the questions. I don't know how you feel about this sort of thing, but, frankly, I'm not inclined to be too apologetic. It's the kind of ridiculous blunder that might have happened to anybody. It's like an act of God. There's no point calling it careless. I don't happen to be a careless lawyer. Unless I'm to be judged by this and this alone.”

Brooks had always regarded Madison as an aloof, superior person, too exalted on his peak of tax brilliance even to scorn such fumbling practitioners as himself. Madison rarely addressed more than a perfunctory greeting to him, except once when he had examined him in astonishing detail about the genealogy of the Tower family. Madison was known in the office for his way of suddenly turning in a corridor to stop people whom he had hardly ever spoken to and asking them rather personal questions. But now Brooks decided that Morris Madison was the first gentleman of the office, and the phoenix that rose from the ashes of his career was a vision of the drama of facing the partners with so gallant an ally. The long heralded crisis had come, but it found him ready. He had felt it as a man for a lifetime; he could dispute it like a man for a day. When he walked into the dining room after Madison, he was even able to smile at the sullen face of Chambers Todd.

Yet Todd was as bad as anyone could have feared. The man had so identified his personal ambition with Tower, Tilney that his agony at the Baxter debacle was as acute as if he had made the error himself. Despite Clitus Tilney's coughs and hints, he kept returning to the subject, long after the others had accepted Madison's brief, dignified statement.

“You say it was Jonas McClintock who prepared the original draft?” he demanded of Madison. “Then it was McClintock who made the error of using Miss Baxter as a measuring life?”

“I've already told you, Chambers, the responsibility is mine.”

“Never mind this I'm-the-captain-of-my-ship attitude,” Todd snapped with a rudeness that shocked the table. “This isn't a court-martial, and I don't give a damn for fancy concepts of responsibility. The point is that we can't afford to have juniors who make such gaffes. McClintock must go.”

“He's a good man, Chambers.”

“Oh, rats. He
was
a good man.”

“You think an associate should not be allowed even one mistake?”

“When it's a mistake like that, I certainly do! If each of them pulled that kind of bull, we'd be out of business in a year's time.”

“I think we've said about all that can be profitably said on the subject,” Clitus Tilney intervened from the head of the table. “The committee on associates will consider McClintock's case. No doubt they will give Mr. Todd's suggestion the weight that it is due. Now may we pass on to other matters?”