Powers of Attorney (3 page)

“Does that mean,” Hyde demanded irately, “that I can no longer sign a chit for a taxi to go to court?”

“It means precisely that. If you go to court on the Granger case.”

Hyde pushed his chair roughly back and strode from the room while the partners exchanged uneasy glances.

“Does anyone think I'm wrong?” Tilney demanded in his highest, most challenging tone. “Does anyone want to see us continue in champertous practices?”

“I'm sure nobody thinks you're wrong, Clitus,” Morris Madison put in in his reasonable tone. “But I do think it was a bit rough on Frank, springing it that way. He'll have to make up those disbursements out of his own pocket.”

“Well, I don't want to know about it if he does,” Tilney exclaimed. “It's just as bad for him to do it as the firm.”

“You won't know it,” Madison said quietly. “He'll simply deposit the money in Mrs. Crimmins' checking account, and she'd pay us. Frank may love his booze, and he may be crusty, but he'll give a client the shirt off his back. And he's not a rich man, either.”

“You're breaking my heart,” Tilney sneered, and he was defiantly glad to note, taking in the table with a rapid glance as he lowered his head over his soup bowl, that he had shocked them all.

 

Hyde was good to his word about giving the Granger estate a fight full of dirt, and the trial attracted even more publicity than the pre-trial hearings. Tilney was sure that his partner had privately hired a press agent and fervently prayed that the latter's bill would be a large one. But for all the dirt and the headlines, for all the weeks of idle testimony, for all the tricks and chicaneries, the defense remained adamant. The legal world found such intransigency hard to understand. It was widely rumored that Hyde had offered to settle for less than half the sum originally tendered him, and the executors made no secret of their dissatisfaction at having their hands tied by legatees. The other stockholders of the Granger Drug Company, worried by the effect of the delayed probate on the affairs of the corporation, had appealed in vain to the widow, and an editorial appeared in a morning paper questioning the right of a charitable foundation to spend more of its money in litigation than a settlement would cost. It was no use. The board of trustees of the Granger Foundation, with a disregard of public opinion unique in the gentle field of charities, issued a statement to the press that because of “the aspersions cast on the name of their distinguished founder,” not even a nominal settlement would be considered.

After that Hyde's case, if case it could be really called, collapsed. When he had called the last of his witnesses, the estate moved for a directed verdict which the surrogate granted. Six weeks later the Appellate Division unanimously rejected Hyde's appeal and denied him leave to appeal higher. Two months after that the Court of Appeals in Albany refused to hear his appeal, and Harry P. Granger's fortune was safe at last from the attacks of his sister and her embittered counsel. Clitus Tilney felt a greater exultation in his heart than he had known at the most splendid of his firm's past triumphs.

 

Only a week after the end of the Granger case Tilney was dressing at home to attend a dinner at the Bar Association in honor of the visiting Lord Chancellor of England. Ada Tilney, whose high pale brow under her faded straight brown hair, parted in the middle in mid-Victorian fashion, was like a rock washed clean by the years of his absences, absences at conventions, testimonial dinners, committee meetings, or simply at the office, sat beside his dresser, fitting the pearl studs in his shirt.

“I left something on the bureau for you,” she said in her placid tone. “Have you seen it yet?”

Tilney noticed a magazine, folded open under his silver-handled hairbrush, and picked it up. It was the
Gotham Gazette,
a periodical sent out free to addresses east of Central Park for the sake of the fashionable advertising. Tilney saw the title of an article, “Early-morning Dog-walking” and beneath it a small photograph of Mrs. Granger and her poodles. Behind her, of course, loomed himself, although he was not identified in the caption which read: “Mrs. Harry P. Granger, widow of the drug magnate, is up and out with her ‘toy' poodles as early as seven o'clock.”

“Most women seem to have trouble with their husbands going out at night,” Ada continued. “It's so like you to make time for infidelity only in the early morning.”

“Ada, you're wonderful!” he exclaimed with a chuckle as he tossed the magazine in the scrap basket. “Let me tell you something funny about that picture. There
is
someone who might make trouble about it. But that someone doesn't happen to be you.”

“Still another woman, no doubt.”

“No, a man.”

The sudden hint of grimness in his tone aroused her apprehension. “Oh, Clitus, does it have something to do with that horrible case? Is it Frank Hyde?”

“It's Frank, all right.” He took his shirt from her. “But do you know something, Ada? I'm a man who's missed two wars. Too young for the first and too old for the second. I've always wondered how I would have behaved under fire. Well, tonight perhaps, I shall find out.”

“But surely Frank would never see a silly magazine like that?”

“There are those in the office who would be only too glad to send it to him. Besides, it's elementary in military intelligence to assume that the enemy knows anything he
could
have known.”

As Tilney entered the long somber portrait-lined reception hall of the Bar Association, filled with black ties and grey heads, Chambers Todd, straight nosed, square jawed, black haired, the “business getting” partner of the office, came up to complain about Hyde.

“He's over there, talking to Judge Caulkins,” he said with a brief nod of his head towards a corner. “He's half plastered already. Something's got to be done about him, Clitus. He's giving the firm a terrible black eye. Suppose he passes out at an affair like this?”

But nothing could dull the curious sense of elation that his little talk with Ada had given Tilney. “It wouldn't be what Madison Avenue calls a good ‘image,' would it?” he asked with a rumbling laugh. “Think of it. Whenever the words Tower, Tilney & Webb' are uttered, the picture flashed on the mental screen is one of an elderly man, inebriated, sinking slowly to his knees.”

“I'm glad you find it so funny,” Todd retorted.

“Leave him to me, Chambers. I'll go and speak to him now.”

As Tilney approached, Judge Caulkins greeted him with the fulsomeness of one anxious to escape an embarrassing colloquy. Hyde, swaying slightly, stared after the retreating jurist with narrowed eyes. He did not look at Tilney.

“What do
you
want?” he muttered.

“I'd like to persuade you to shift to soda water. Just until dinner, old man.”

“Don't ‘old man' me. You had the gall to talk to me about champerty. What about betraying one's own client? Which is worse?” Hyde turned suddenly on Tilney and almost shouted as he repeated the question. “Which?”

“Do you imply that I betrayed a client?” Tilney asked calmly. “Whom?”

“You tricked Mrs. Crimmins out of half a million bucks! By some kind of rinky-dink with Mrs. Granger. What do you think the Grievance Committee will think of
that?”

“Ask them.”

Hyde steadied himself against the back of the sofa. “Do you know how many copies of that picture I found on my desk this morning?
Three!”

“My wife had one for me,” Tilney announced with a laugh. “She had a couple of questions herself.” His spirits rose to a peak as he felt the dizzy joy of danger, and he regretted the wars he had missed. “But if you think you can make something out of my old friendship with Margaret Granger, by all means go ahead. Drag the poor woman to the Grievance Committee. Drag me. And don't blame anyone but Francis Hyde when you've made the biggest fool of yourself in all New York!”

Hyde's watery eyes began to twitch. He glanced around at the bar. “I think I'll get myself one more little drink before we go in.”

Tilney laughed again, an elated laugh, as he saw that he had won. And won, too, not in the sneaky way of his conference in the park, but with all his cards on the table. There was bluffing indeed! But the foe had not only to be routed; he had to be destroyed. “Tarry, Frank,” he called softly after him, and the other turned back in surprise. “You and I can't go on this way. You have threatened me, and we can no longer be partners. You promised to resign from the firm if you lost the Granger case. I should like to invoke that promise now.”

Hyde's eyes peered at Tilney as if he had not fully grasped his meaning. “Have you discussed this with the firm?”

“They can choose between you and me.”

“I see.” Hyde nodded vaguely. “Between you and me.”

“I would assume that an adequate pension would be arranged for whichever has to go.”

“An adequate pension,” Hyde mumbled with a thickening tone. “Yes, no doubt.”

Tilney watched him as he ambled off to the bar, and for the first time it occurred to him that Hyde might be an object of pity. He seemed old now and frail, and the prospect of lonely days as well as nights at the Hone Club seemed dismal enough. Still, there might be work that the firm could send him, or legal aid, or committee work for the Bar Association, or even writing law review articles. And the pension would be adequate; he would see to that.

He saw that Hyde was arguing with the bartender, who was reluctant to give him another drink. The dining room doors were open, and the guests were beginning to move forward.

“Look at him, Clitus! Shall I take him home?”

It was Todd again at his elbow, and Tilney in a single grim second saw all the fatuity of his own reasoning. Frank Hyde was doomed to a lonely, miserable, alcoholic old age, and nothing on earth was going to alter that doom. But was it any sadder than the withering of a leaf or the eating of flesh by carnivores? The senior partner of Tower, Tilney & Webb had not created the universe.

“Oh, God, there he goes!” moaned Todd as Hyde fell suddenly forward on the bar table. The noise was slight and attracted only the notice of those in the immediate vicinity, but when Hyde tried to get up his right arm suddenly swept a whole tray of glasses to the floor, and the hideous crash brought silence to the entire vast chamber.

“There's your image, Todd!” Tilney called after the younger man who was hurrying to help their fallen partner. He resisted the impulse to go himself. He would spare Hyde the final mortification of having the victor help him to his feet. It was probably the last mortification that it would be in his power to spare him.

L
IKE
many of the associates of Tower, Tilney & Webb, Jake Platt came from the Middle West—Winnetka, Illinois—and lived during the first bachelor years of his legal apprenticeship in Greenwich Village. He spent many of his free evenings in discussion groups and of his weekend afternoons in soft-ball games with the boys at St. Martin's Settlement House, but after he had resolved upon the serious courtship of Leila Frisby, a dark-haired, wide-eyed Bennington graduate who was determined to make her way off-Broadway, he haunted the fringes of Bohemia. Her friends accepted him because he was handsome and silent and because his easy, pipe-smoking, blond, American masculinity made a pleasant background for discussions of Rothko and Sartres. And then, too, he was helpful about leases and contracts, and for those of them who cared, the income tax. What they did not know was that behind the tireless twinkle of those ceaselessly surveying grey eyes lay the serene conviction that they were dilettantes without any real existence and that once Leila had married him and moved to the red-brick truth of Stuyvesant Town and given birth to the first of a planned family of three, she would have no more time, as he put it to himself, to “wait for Godot.”

Nor was his prediction unfulfilled. After Leila had become Mrs. Platt and the mother of little Jock, she began to be more critical of her old friends. They failed to recognize the pull of her new responsibilities, and if she and Jake wouldn't stay at a party till dawn, they didn't seem to care if she came at all. Thus the connection with Bohemia was gradually dissolved without Jake's having once to suggest it. But what he had not anticipated was that her abandonment of old affiliations did not bring with it any immediate enthusiasm for new ones. Leila viewed the Saturday night supper parties which they now attended, made up entirely of young lawyers and their wives, mostly from Tower, Tilney & Webb, with a more jaundiced eye than he quite liked.

“It's bad enough with the men,” she complained on their way home from one of these, “though at least one expects them to talk shop. But Margy Schlide! She keeps it up even with the girls. She told me tonight that Barry had to make partner this year or never and that his chances were exactly two out of five.”

“How does she figure that out? I would have said they weren't one in a hundred.”

“Because he didn't go to Harvard, I suppose.” Leila had preserved intact from her Village days the prejudice that firms like Tower, Tilney & Webb selected their partners exclusively from Harvard.

“No, of course not. Relatively few of the associates went to Harvard. I didn't go to Harvard myself.”

“No, but you might as well have. You have that cool, snooty look that poor Barry will never develop.”

Jake paused to control his irritation and to recapture the look which his wife had described. “It's not the way Barry looks or talks that's against him,” he explained in a judicial tone. “The powers that be aren't so superficial. It's the way he
acts.
”

“How?”

“Well, he calls even the young partners ‘sir' for example. And he doubles up with laughter every time one of them makes a joke. He's always polishing the apple. That sort of thing doesn't go downtown.”