The Friend of Women and Other Stories (19 page)

“Not much, I fear. But you see, the child's been ill, and he gets so querulous when he doesn't have the things he wants to play with that I'm afraid he'll run a temperature.”

“Better than if the club manager does. Really, Kate! I suppose this is from one of those crazy books you're always reading about the latest theories of childcare.”

“Well, I do like to keep up to date. And in Dr. Bonsai's new treatise, he claims that indulging a child needn't—”

“Where's the boy's nurse?” Rosina interrupted.

“She's taking the girls swimming.”

“Well, get her and tell her to take Willy to some part of the beach where he's less visible. And then come join me for a cooling drink.”

Later, when the two of them were seated at an umbrella table on the terrace, Rosina decided that her moment had come.

“I've never been convinced there's a god, Kate, but if there be one, surely he, she, or it never intended that you should waste the considerable talent you've been given supplying enema tubes to children of bizarre tastes who would be far better off left to their efficient nurses. I miss my guess if God didn't intend you to write a great novel.” In the silence that followed Rosina noted that Kate was interested. Perhaps even deeply interested. “Well, then, write it!”

After a moment Kate shook her head. “I might get too involved.”

“Wouldn't that be just the fun of it? Even perhaps the joy of it?”

“Not, you see, Rosina, if it interfered with my principal duties.”

“You mean your family, of course. But, Kate dear, your husband works all day, and your children will be more and more taken up with their schools and sports and nasty little friends. You'll have plenty of time to write.”

“It's not just a question of time, Rosina. It's a question of emphasis. Howard works hard, it's true, and the older girls are more often away now, but they all still need me, and they depend on me to provide a home base where they will always be comforted, encouraged, and deeply understood. I don't for a minute undervalue my importance in their lives. And to maintain it has got to be my primary goal. Of course, I have time to do some writing. But I know myself well enough to know that if I really gave myself to an art, I'd end up giving it all I've got. There would be very little left over for anyone else.”

“Well, hooray! That will be just what will save you when the children are all married, middle-aged, and moodily self-centered, and a retired Howard is living on the golf course!”

“There'll be grandchildren, I hope.”

“You can't make a life out of grandchildren. They go through the expected act of ‘adoring' old granny, but it doesn't mean much. I know. I was a granddaughter myself once. I remember those Sunday lunches!”

“Well, Rosina, I guess we must agree to disagree.”

“Not before I've said one more thing. I know what you think of me, Kate. You're much too kind to say it to me, or indeed to anyone else, but deep down you regard me as a frustrated old maid who tries to cover her lack of a loving family in collecting bibelots and raising begonias. You imagine that I secretly envy you. And I do! But not for your spouse or your daughters or even for the little boy playing with the enema tube. No! I envy you for the talent that you're criminally wasting and that one day you will passionately regret!”

Kate was perfectly aware, in the months that followed, that her friend had undertaken a campaign to undermine her faith in the lares and penates of her domestic life with the object of clearing the field for a literary career. But she did not really mind this; indeed, she found it rather titillating. That an intellect as keen as Rosina's should deem her capable of serious writing was exciting to her. She might have no intention of abandoning the established goals of her private life, but she saw no harm in playing with the idea. It was a pleasing fantasy.

Rosina started her project by purporting to find clay feet at the base of the idol of the Rand household: the great former governor and senator Clarence Cook, who was the revered senior partner of Howard's firm. Kate had had no reason hitherto to suspect that her own deep admiration of Cook was not totally merited. He was the kind of man whom other men both liked and wanted to be. He was not only an expert lawyer and a deft administrator, he was a splendid piece of male furniture: stalwart, broad-shouldered, with thick wavy white hair, large friendly hazel-blue eyes, a commanding brow and chin, and a deep voice that was hearty and usually welcoming. And though he had an upper-class stance and manner—he came of old colonial stock—he knew just how to put humbler folk at their ease; at firm outings that included the whole staff he would spread general hilarity and share his thermos with the office boys. You couldn't fault him. At least Kate couldn't.

But Rosina could. She was a client of Anthon, Cook, and Bartlett, though her means were much slighter than those of the tycoons on their roster, because her family had been represented by the firm since its origin, and Cook was loyal to old retainers.

“But surely Clarence looks after you well,” Kate protested after one of her friend's more withering remarks. “Didn't you tell me that he always sees you himself when you go to the office, and doesn't pawn you off on some junior?”

“Oh, he does that indeed, and does it very well!” Rosina exclaimed with mock enthusiasm. “I am ushered at once into his great paneled office where I sink in carpet. He rises to greet me with a beaming smile that would conceal his inner thoughts to anyone less percipient than your humble servant.”

“And how do you read those inner thoughts?”

“Oh, very clearly. He is thinking, Here she is, that sad old virgin, counting on her antecedents to lower my fee. But he comforts himself with the recollection that he is only performing his god-given function of providing solace to those who must envy his fame, his glory, his goodness!”

“Oh, Rosina, you really are most unfair.”

“Am I?”

Kate chose not to go on with the discussion. It made her uneasy, for she knew how great a debt her husband owed to Cook. It was the senior partner who bolstered Howard's position in the firm. Howard might be expert enough in the details of the ancient and technical laws of real estate and property and popular in the firm, but Kate knew that there were younger members, avid for higher percentages of the net income, who questioned the need of Howard's department at all or reasoned that it could be handled by a clerk, not a partner. And Kate suspected that the senior partner's distinct preference for her company at office social gatherings—like her, he was a great reader and found little congeniality with other partners' wives—was a possible asset in his continuing support of her husband.

It so happened that on the night of this last discussion of Cook with Rosina, Howard came home from the office with a very drawn look. He explained it after she had mixed him his cocktail.

“Clarence came to see me in my office today. I knew it was important for otherwise he'd have sent for me. And it
was
important. He informed me that the executive committee has decided to invite Sam Zebulon to become a member of the firm.”

“I don't believe it!”

“It's true.”

“Can't he overturn the committee?”

“Kate, dear, the executive committee executes only what Clarence tells them! He came to me because he knows of our connection with Zebulon.”

“And did you tell him about the wretch?”

“There's very little Clarence doesn't know. But there are also things he doesn't want to know.”

“Then what are you going to do about it?”

“I'm going to grin and bear it. What else?”

Sam Zebulon was an evil spirit in Howard's family. He had been a brilliant office boy in Uncle Jules Anthon's office, so able and quick that Uncle Jules had put him through law school. He had graduated first in his class and applied for a job in the firm of his benefactor. As in those days, Uncle Jules's firm had been one of the downtown groups that employed no Jews, and he had been rejected. Uncle Jules got him a job in a smaller firm, but Zebulon had apparently harbored a deep resentment that surfaced in the brutal way he handled a lawsuit against Uncle Jules's son, representing the son's alienated wife and bringing up unproven charges of child abuse and homosexuality. Zebulon had gone on to become famous for the huge awards he obtained for rather tainted spouses, and his reputation at the bar was cloudy, to say the least. But of recent years he appeared to have somewhat cleaned himself up and won fame successfully representing the thoroughly respectable and clearly wronged wife of one of the nation's richest men.

“But, darling, this will change the whole character of the firm!”

“Clarence doesn't see it that way. He says our trust and estate department needs a beefing up, and this is the man to do it. I pointed out that it's a departure from our policy of only making partners from within, but he says we haven't the right candidate within. He's not going to change his mind, so that's that.”

She knew now that he would never speak again of the matter to his senior partner. Howard looked up to Clarence Cook as his god. But might she not for once try her own hand at the game? The high and unblemished reputation of the firm was certainly one of the major penates on the domestic altar at which she daily dedicated her life. And was not the senior partner her particular friend? Did he not seek out her company at office social events, even to the jealousy of some of the other partners' wives? With her he could show a side of himself not always visible to those who surrounded him: he could be the reader, the philosopher, the man whose mind leapt to the unknowable beyond the daily grind of the bar. And was he not an idealist? Could he really tolerate a conjunction with such a man as Zebulon if he were possessed of the facts? Never!

The following Sunday, when she and Howard were weekending in their Hampton villa, they were invited to a large Sunday lunch at the neighboring Cook estate. After the meal her host took her for a private stroll to view his rose garden, in which he took great pride, and she found herself seated with him on a marble bench by a fountain irrigated from the lips of carved frogs. It was her moment to speak.

Why did she suddenly think of Mrs. Samson and the dinner party she had skipped in order to take the children on a picnic? Mrs. Samson, it was true, had been a guest at the lunch, and was still in the house, but it was not that. Was it a sense that she, Kate, was not fitting into the world as it was? That she was a dingy bird without protective coloration?

Still, she proceeded.

“Howard and I, Clarence, can't help wondering if you would be so willing to make a partner of Mr. Zebulon if you knew what we know about him.”

“And what is it that you know, Kate?”

Clarence had at once adopted his bland expressionless legal look. He didn't flicker an eye or utter a word while she expatiated, nervously and sometimes repetitiously, on the dark side of the man whom she finally summed up as a Uriah Heep.

When Cook spoke, it was with the faintest tinge of threat in his tone. “Did Howard put you up to this?”

“Oh, never!” she gasped. “This is just between you and me.”

“Then that is just where we should leave it.”

Kate hesitated. Did she catch a flash of yellow in those watching eyes? Like the distant glint of lightning on a sultry summer day? Was she approaching the limit of the little meadow specially mowed for her and Howard Rand? Was she daring to step into the dark neighboring woods that she had hitherto seen as simply romantic? But she had a job to do.

“But you must see, Clarence, that the firm is Howard's life as well as his business. It's his club, his friends, almost his family. And I wonder if he could bring himself even to speak to a man whom he regards, rightly or wrongly, as evil incarnate.”

“Are you telling me, Kate, that I would have two partners who would not be on speaking terms with each other?”

“I'm afraid so, yes.”

“Then it will be your job to talk Howard out of any such behavior. If Howard is to continue as my partner, it will be necessary for him to be on good terms with every other partner.”

“Oh, Clarence, how can I guarantee that?”

“Because you must. For Howard's own good and that of his family. Now listen to me, Kate. I am going to tell you some home truths. Howard is a loveable man, probably the most popular of the partners with the clerks and staff. And he is a good and careful lawyer with his deeds and mortgages. In a small town, with a local practice, he would be one of the leaders of the community. But in New York he's in a league that's too big for him. If we shut down his department, as some of the partners want to, and farm out its work to a small specialized firm, there would be no other department in which I could place him. He has no expertise in corporate law or litigation, and he's not the type for either, anyway. He could probably get a job in a real estate firm, but only at a small fraction of what we now pay him. I've kept his department going, Kate, but only by using my veto in our executive committee. If I can do that for him, you can do this. Make him see the light.”

It was to Kate as if she had gone up to the observation tower of a skyscraper only to have the promenade deck collapse around her, forcing her to cling to the wall. “It's going to be hard to tell him all that.”

“Not as hard as you think. People are apt to know more about their tenuous hold on reality than they let on.”

“But what you don't see, Clarence, is how awful it wall be for Howard to learn that his position in the firm depends on your bounty. He has always liked to imagine that he is an integral part of the firm's history. That some kind of mande, however abbreviated, had descended from his uncle Jules to his own shoulders. He tried to see the family connection as a kind of figurehead, not as a real power base, of course, but perhaps as a handy symbol of past and continuing eminence in the field of law.”