Powers of Attorney (10 page)

The next Friday night they were to meet as usual at their restaurant, and Madison, who arrived first, ordered a cocktail to dull the edge of his now almost unbearable excitement. As he was raising the glass to his lips, however, he saw Aurelia crossing the room towards their table, carrying the three red volumes which he had sent to her. He noted with instant dismay that she looked pale and haggard, as if she had not slept in two nights, and her eyes avoided his as she slipped into his seat. She pushed the books towards him, without a word, and he placed them carefully on the bench beside him.

“Is something wrong?”

“Oh, Morris, my friend, I don't know how to tell you. Please order me a drink. No, let me have yours.” She took his glass and drank from it quickly. “I can't stay for dinner. I'm all done in. I'm going to bed. I only came to return the books. I know how precious they are.”

“Are you ill?”

“No, just tired.”

“Was my poor diary so tedious?” he asked, with death in his heart.

She took another sip of his cocktail. “I tell you what,” she said abruptly. “I'll have my little say, and then I'll be off.” She paused, and when she spoke again there was a tremble of deep feeling in her voice. “Dear Morris, I hope that you and I will always be the best of friends. But I cannot marry you.”

“Because of the diary?”

“Because of the diary.”

“Is it so terrible?”

She seemed to consider this. “It's a monster,” she said in a hushed, low tone. Again she paused and then relented a bit. “Though I suppose there's nothing wrong with a monster if you don't happen to be on its bill of fare.”

“And you are?”

“Oh, my dear, you should know that. Don't you send a tribute of men and maidens each year to the labyrinth? No, I'm
serious,
Morris,” she exclaimed when he smiled. “You've created a robot! He's grown and grown until you can no longer control him, and now he's rampaging the countryside. I dared to face him. I tried to give you time to get away. I was even able to stand him off a while. But now my stones are gone, and Goliath is stalking towards me!”

“How fantastical you are. Really, Aurelia, I wouldn't have thought it of you. You've seen for yourself that the entries stop with our friendship. If anyone's won, it's you.”

“But I tell you I'm out of ammunition!” she exclaimed shrilly. “I have to take my heels while I can. For don't think Goliath wouldn't get his revenge for all those missing entries. I should be made his slave, like you. I should be harnessed and put to work. After all, he has missed the woman's touch, hasn't he? The woman's point of view? Isn't that the one thing he needs. Didn't Pepys have a wife? Wasn't there a Mrs. Saint-Simon?”

“There was a duchess,” Madison said dryly.

“Exactly. And your diary wants a Mrs. Madison. But it won't be me. And if you're wise, Morris, it won't be anyone. You and your diary can be happy together. But, I beg of you, don't listen to it when it points its long, inky finger at another human being!”

Madison was beginning to wonder if she was sober. “You must think me demented.”

“Well, I don't suppose you'd burn down New York to make a page for your diary.” She laughed a bit wildly. “After all, you might burn the diary with it. But, no, you have copies in a vault, don't you?” Here she seemed at last to remember herself, and she placed a rueful hand on his. “Forgive me, my dear, for being so overwrought. Let me slip away now and get a good night's sleep. I'll take a pill. And next week we'll talk on the telephone and see if we can't put things back on the nice old friendly basis.”

“Aurelia—”

But she was gone. She was hurrying across the room, between the tables, and he had actually to run to catch up with her, clutching his three volumes.

“Aurelia!” he cried in a tone that made her turn and stare. “Wait!”

“What is it, Morris? What more is there to say?”

“You haven't told me what you
think
of the diary.”

She seemed not to comprehend. “I haven't?”

“I mean what you think of it
as
a diary.”

“Oh.” She treated this almost as an irrelevance. “But it's magnificent, of course. You know that.”

“It's just what I
don't
know! It's just what I've spent the past several months trying to find out!”

“Oh, my dear,” she murmured, shaking her head sadly, “you have nothing to worry about
there.
It's luminous. It's pulsating. It's unbelievable, really. I doubt if there's ever been anything like it. Poor old Saint-Simon, his nose
will
be out of joint. Oh, yes, Morris. Your diary is peerless.”

She turned again to go out the door, and he let her go. For a moment he stood there, dazed, stock-still by the checkroom, until the headwaiter asked him if he wished to dine alone. He shook his head quickly and went out to the street to hail a taxi. It was only seven-thirty; he had still time to dine at the Century Club. When he got there, he hurried to the third floor and glanced, as he always did, through the oval window to see who was sitting at the members' table. There was an empty seat between Raymond Massey and Ed Murrow. Opposite he noted the great square noble face and shaggy head of Learned Hand. He must have just finished one of his famous anecdotes, for Madison heard the sputter of laughter around his end of the table. It would be a good night. As he glided forward to take that empty seat he knew that he was a perfectly happy man again.

M
RS
. A
BERCROMBIE
would have been with Tower Tilney & Webb, come December, a grand total of forty years and was scheduled to be retired in the spring on her sixty-fifth birthday, when she and Mr. Abercrombie, an already pensioned accountant, planned to move to a new ranch house at a prudent distance from the beach in Montauk. Mr. Abercrombie, who found his rambles in Prospect Park, even with the zoo, inadequate to fill the long Brooklyn mornings and afternoons, looked forward to the change, but his wife was less enthusiastic. Where would she find, along the windy dunes of Long Island, the special consideration, the almost awesome isolation, which she enjoyed as secretary of the Tower Estates and treasurer of the Tower Foundation, known to all the office staff as the amanuensis of the late senior partner and surrogate, Reginald Tower?

Mrs. Abercrombie liked to think that she looked the part that she liked to play, and to some extent she did. Her slow, rolling gait gave to her broad figure, as it progressed down the corridors, and to her square chin, her high, broad brow, her crowning pompadour of silky grey, some of the dignity of a capital ship proceeding into harbor on a choppy sea but nonetheless ready, with sailors in white manning the rail, to render honors to the local commander. Her small office contained only a desk, two chairs and a large, mahogany framed photograph of Surrogate Tower in his robes, but she had it all to herself, and on the opaque glass door appeared, in gold lettering, the words “Tower Estates,” followed by “Mrs. Abercrombie, Secretary.” The next office was occupied by Rutherford Tower, whose nervous manner and furtive eyes seemed constantly to apologize for any presumption in sharing the last name of his deceased uncle. Mrs. Abercrombie could see only a parody of the Surrogate in his long, sallow features, and she particularly minded his habit of setting his teeth, because he did so only when he was frightened and not, like his uncle, when he was crossed. His teeth were set with a particular rigidity one morning, a month before Christmas, when he called her in to discuss tax returns.

“Mr. Tilney's on one of his efficiency rampages,” he began gloomily. “He seems to think all the income tax returns should be prepared by the tax department.”

“Surely not mine?”

By “mine” Mrs. Abercrombie meant those of Rutherford Tower's uncle's family. Indeed, the preparation of these, plus the processing of law students' applications for Tower Foundation grants, constituted her principal activities in the firm.

“Even yours, I'm afraid.” He looked up at her with the abrupt, sullen defiance of the timid. “Even Aunt Mildred's.”

“I don't think Mrs. Tower would want anyone else prying into her personal affairs. I have
always
done her returns.”

“Well, it seems she was at dinner at the Tilneys' the other night and agreed to the whole thing. Tilney told her you couldn't be expected to keep up to date on every last tax wrinkle.”

His words were a bleak reminder of the desolating disloyalty of people like Mrs. Tower. It was all very well to warm oneself in the sunshine of their benignant smiles on those rare visits downtown to sign a will, to cut a coupon, to make a tax-free gift, or to be lulled by their smooth, firm, complimentary voices on the telephone—“Dear Mrs. A, would it be a terrible imposition to ask you to address my Christmas cards this year?”—but one always knew, in a drafty little corner of one's heart, that one did not really exist for them, that at dinner tables covered with thin-stemmed wineglasses and silver candelabra they would betray one to the Tilneys of this world, for a snicker, let alone a laugh.

“I think, if you don't mind my saying so, Mr. Tower, that you make a mistake to let Mr. Tilney take over the running of your department. Of course, I understand that as senior partner he has a general responsibility for the firm. But surely that doesn't include all the details. Surely, it behooves you to stand up for your own!”

“I do my best, Mrs. A,” he replied with an ashy little smile. “But Tilney's always shouting about people not pulling their weight.”

“The Surrogate used to say,” Mrs. Abercrombie retorted in the high, cheerful, rippling tone, like the crest of a fast moving breaker, that she used in invoking her late employer's title, “that one couldn't evaluate an estate practice over one year, or even two or three. But he maintained that if one took a sufficiently long view, one would find it was estates that paid the rent!”

“Well, until you can convince Mr. Tilney of that, I am afraid we must do as he says.”

Mrs. Abercrombie stood motionless for a heavy moment; then, without a word, she slowly turned to depart. But she did not fool herself. The dignity of her exit hardly covered her sweeping defeat in the matter of the tax returns. For years now, in fact, even since before the beloved Surrogate's death, she had viewed with an increasingly critical eye what Clitus Tilney was doing to the firm. As a young woman she had come into an office that still had some of the aroma of the days of the great individualist lawyers, those driving, nervous men who had cleaned out of the practice of law the windy court oratory of a Websterian age and substituted the machinelike chatter of corporate meetings, dry, snappish authoritarian men who, for all that, had had distinction as well as arrogance, manners as well as testiness, who had believed in being gentlemen as well as lawyers, who had collected paintings, built great houses, loved old wines. They might have driven their staffs unmercifully, but their offices had had charm: safes that did not open, or to which everyone had the combination, receptionists who were burly, storytelling, retired cops who shouted at clients, and tea served to everybody at five in big, dark comfortable libraries. There were no silvery bells to summon people to the telephone, no honey-toned switchboard operators, no “office organization” pamphlets, no memoranda from headquarters on little points of procedure, no office parties or “outings” to improve morale. And now? Well, now they might as well move to Madison Avenue and have done with it!

 

Mrs. Abercrombie lunched that day with Mrs. Grimshawe, head of stenographic. Her relations with the staff were governed by three simple rules. To the new girls and office boys she merely nodded, if she happened to pass them in the corridor. With those who had been employed five years or more she occasionally chatted, seated in her corner armchair in the recreation room. With a few intimates, of high position and long tenure of employment, she lunched and permitted the use of Christian names. Of the latter group Lois Grimshawe was certainly closest to her, yet Mrs. Abercrombie had always ruefully to acknowledge that Lois, for all her sympathy and sharing of complaints, had manifested a distinct tendency to compromise with the Tilney administration. She had dyed her hair and divorced her husband, and Mrs. Abercrombie even suspected that the morning headaches of which she complained were not always the result of her vaunted insomnia.

At lunch Mrs. Grimshawe always had a martini, while her friend had a small dry sherry, but that day she suggested a second round.

“I'm sorry, Annabel,” she said a bit snappishly, in answer to Mrs. Abercrombie's stare. “I'm feeling nervous today. I can't seem to concentrate on anything I'm doing.”

“I wonder if a second cocktail will help that.”

“It calms me down. It's all very well for you to be superior with a quiet room to yourself and the same things to do every day. I'd like to see you in that stenographic pool coping with twenty-five giddy girls who can think of nothing but lipstick and dates!”

Mrs. Abercrombie knew perfectly well that Lois Grimshawe was proud of her high position in the new scheme of things. She was like a collaborating member of a dispossessed nobility who sneers at the People's Army while secretly exulting in his commission. Mrs. Abercrombie knew how to deal with such pride.

“I know how difficult it must be for you, Lois,” she said in a soothing tone. “Believe me, you have all my sympathy. You're the one who gets the real worm's-eye view of the Tilney system. The clients may be impressed by the smooth efficiency of the outer office, but it's you who see the chaos behind it all.”

“I'll have you know, Annabel, there's no chaos in
my
department!”

“Of course, I don't mean it's your fault, my dear.”