Powers of Attorney (11 page)

“If there were chaos, it
would
be my fault.”

“We all do our best, I'm sure,” Mrs. Abercrombie said enigmatically as she raised her near-empty glass of sherry to her lips. In the silence that followed her final sip Mrs. Grimshawe gathered the courage to jettison the rattling piece of news for which she had wanted the binding chords of a second martini.

“I'm afraid Miss Bruney is going to be added to that chaos.”

Mrs. Abercrombie stared. “Miss Bruney?” she demanded. “
My
secretary?”

Of course she knew perfectly well and knew that Mrs. Grimshawe knew, that Miss Bruney was Rutherford Tower's secretary, but by dint of long encroachment, now amounting to a kind of eminent domain and having started from a simple plea for “a couple of letters a day,” she had succeeded in pre-empting a good half of Miss Bruney's time.

“She's being transferred to the stenographic pool. I had a memo this morning from the boss himself.”

“But I trained Miss Bruney!”

“Tell that to Tilney.”

“What perversity makes that man interfere with things that don't concern him? This is the second time today!”

“Not a sparrow falls but he notices,” Mrs. Grimshawe said somberly.

“Well, here's one sparrow that may be going to tumble right out of his nest!”

“You don't mean you'd resign?”

“I mean,” Mrs. Abercrombie said grandly, “that there must be some limit to the quantity of humble pie that even an old and faithful servant can be obliged to consume.”

“Annabel!” exclaimed Mrs. Grimshawe, her resentment dwindling now before her genuine concern. “Remember your pension. All you have to do is wait for the spring. Don't rock the boat now, dearie. Nothing's worth that!”

“If God Tilney chooses to cut off my pension, after forty years of faithful service, then God Tilney will do so.”

“Let's not go to extremes.” Mrs. Grimshawe's tone was sharp and practical. “You know what I'd do if I were you? I'd go to Mr. Tilney myself and tell him my problem. Everyone knows that he kicks Mr. Tower around. But you're something else again. I wonder if Tilney would make quite so many changes if he had to deal directly with you. Let me call Marjorie Clinger this afternoon and make an appointment.”

Mrs. Abercrombie was at once struck with the idea and relieved not to have to make the first overture to the senior partner's secretary. For Miss Clinger was the very symbol of the Tilney era; she had a reputation for miraculous efficiency and seemed to live for her work. She was one of those large, pretty, modern old maids who seem to freeze at forty into a perpetual pantomime of eye rolling and good-natured, half rueful jokes about their own virgin status. She treated everyone, from Mr. Tilney down, with the same slangy familiarity, and was even supposed to be invited to cocktail parties in the homes of partners. Mrs. Abercrombie found this all very unfitting. It was true that she herself had been invited to the Surrogate's at “Number Nine,” as the house on Seventieth Street had been called, but only on New Year's Day for a glass of hot mulled wine.

“Lois tells me you want to see the boss,” Miss Clinger told her on the telephone later that afternoon. It was like Miss Clinger to start right off that way, without even announcing herself, as soon as Mrs. Abercrombie had picked up the instrument. “It must be mental telepathy because he wants to see
you.
Why don't you come up in half an hour, and I'll see if I can squeeze you in between appointments?”

“Perhaps you will be good enough to ring me when he's ready. I can come right up.”

“No, no, that never works. The only way to catch Tilney is to crouch outside his door and pounce when you see the chance!”

Offensive though she found such a procedure, Mrs. Abercrombie had to submit, and an hour later she found herself literally propelled, by the push of Miss Clinger's palm between her shoulderblades, into the smiling, smoking presence of the big, long-nosed, high-browed senior partner who was calling out to her in his loud, amiably mocking tone: “Well, well, Mrs. Abercrombie, it's good to see you! How is everything going in the great world of philanthropy?”

“Satisfactorily, I trust, sir. We're very busy.” She noted that she had not been asked to sit.

“Philanthropy is the greatest thing in the world,” Mr. Tilney continued airily, “but unhappily we can't all be foundations. At least law firms can't. We're in the grubby business of trying to make an honest buck. And the cost of overhead, Mrs. Abercrombie, is something that no lawyer can any longer afford to ignore. Gone, gone are the dear old days when you could fill up your stenographic department with trained girls at twenty dollars a week. We must take what we can get and grab what we can grab. Which is why I've had to grab Miss Bruney. I hope you'll understand.”

“I suppose I can train another girl. It will take time, but I suppose I can do it.”

“But that's just it, my dear Mrs. A, why take the trouble? I'm told that the volume of Mr. Tower's work doesn't warrant a full-time secretary. We thought that you might pitch in and lend us a hand. How about it? Could you take care of him?”

“Me, sir? You mean that I should take ... that I should take Mr. Tower's
dictation?”

“Does that astound you?”

“Well, I haven't done that kind of work ... for years.”

“But Mr. Tower, the
real
Mr. Tower, used to tell us you had the fastest shorthand in the office. Surely, you haven't lost it all?”

“Perhaps not all,” Mrs. Abercrombie said hesitantly.

“Oh, I'm sure not,” the senior partner went on confidently. “It wasn't all that long ago. And how in awe we all used to be of you, Mrs. A! Do you remember that day I came in looking for a job, with hayseeds in my hair, and you tipped me off on how to handle the old man? I'll never forget it!”

Mrs. Abercrombie was touched. “I remember it very well. The Surrogate always said that you were a go-getter. He was very proud that he was the one who'd ‘spotted' you.”

“And he spotted you, too, didn't he?”

“I guess he did, at that.”

“Of course he did. So two old Tower ‘spottees' should help each other out, don't you think? After all, it's only until spring, and then you'll be free of the lot of us. Take care of Mr. Tower till then, won't you?” Mr. Tilney glanced at a printed proof on his desk and then reached over to pull it nearer, presumably to resume the day's work. “Oh, and Mrs. A,” he added, looking back at her as if it was she and not he who was concluding the interview, “I hope you're planning to attend the office Christmas party this year. We're all very much aware that it's your fortieth anniversary—fortieth, it's hard to believe isn't it?—you look no older than the day I first walked in here—and we've planned a little presentation.”

“Well, that's very nice, I'm sure. Thank you, Mr. Tilney.”

“Thank
you,
Mrs. A!”

And everything would have been all right; everything would have been, in fact, quite “dreamy,” to use Lois Grimshawe's favorite adjective, except for one wretched little circumstance. As Mrs. Abercrombie passed between the two desks, in the anteroom outside his office, of Miss Clinger and Mr. Webb's secretary, she distinctly saw out of the corner of her eye, the former lean forward over her typewriter to cast a quick wink behind her back. So that was it, she breathed to herself as she quickened her pace, as if to flee from the smothered giggle that might follow before she was out of earshot. She had been fixed. She, Annabel Abercrombie, had been “coped with,” a poor old shabby piece of baggage which could, with some extra string, be used for one final load, one last trip. And if it burst in the station and cast its goods shamefully over the platform, what did it really matter? It was only the junk bag, anyway.

 

It was inevitable under the circumstances—and she was even a bit ashamed of it herself—that the first person to test the force of her resentment should be Rutherford Tower. He had certainly never asked, poor man, that Mrs. Abercrombie should replace Miss Bruney; he was simply the baser nature that had come within the pass of mighty opposites. When Mrs. Abercrombie came in the next day and sat sedately down for the morning's dictation, a good forty minutes after his ring (forty minutes, she claimed, that were necessarily dedicated to his aunt's mail) and held up her pad as if it were some strange, faintly comic gadget that she had never seen before, he kept his eyes directed down at the desk to avoid the embarrassment of revealing either his irritation or his timidity. Whenever Mrs. Abercrombie asked him to repeat a word or phrase, which was frequent, he would do so with a loud, clear, patient articulation of each syllable. “I'm not deaf yet, you know,” she reminded him cheerfully, and then, when he had recommenced dictation and was going too fast, she would hold her pencil suspended until he had finished a paragraph and lost forever his beginning before observing: “I'm afraid I shall have to ask you to go over that again.” If he dared so much as give an answering cough to show his dismay, she would follow up with: “Now, now, Mr. Tower, this isn't some sort of a speed contest, is it?” and settle back in her chair with a rumbling laugh. But the simplest way, she soon found out, to bring him to the slippery edge of distraction was to find a piece of Tower Foundation business to place ahead of every letter or document that he had dictated. If he loomed up in her doorway after lunch, with a hunted look, to ask if the letter to Standard Trust Company which he had given her at ten o'clock was ready, she would reply, with a mocking shake of her head and a serene smile: “Ready? Why, bless you, I haven't even started it. Do you realize I have
six
more students' applications to finish before I can even get to the memos you gave me yesterday?” It might have been a bit hard on him, but was not the whole catastrophe attributable to his cowardice? Why did he not stand up for his rights? Had not his Tower ancestors been leaders of the bar when the Tilneys were selling newspapers in the streets of Ulrica?

But it was Tilney himself, of course, and not Tower who would have to bear the full force of her reproach, and she had selected the Christmas party as the occasion for this. After receiving her gift she w'ould undoubtedly be asked to say a few words, and then she would be able to point up the contrast between the gracious past and a present without values, between the polished but profound gentleman scholars of yesteryear and the legal hucksters of today. She would not do it crudely, or even bitterly. She would do it with a high, dry, faintly wistful humor, with little smiles cast about among the partners, smiles that would contain, in addition to a proper gratitude and affection, the least hint of reproach, forgivable in a long-faithful servant, at their lowered standards and an invocation to remember the splendid old things that had made the firm great. It would be dignified, tasteful, moving—and devastating. It would give Clitus Tilney a lesson that even his bland capacity for wishful thinking would not quite be able to brush off. She spent her evenings now composing the speech and trying portions of it out on Mr. Abercrombie, who was never to have the good fortune of hearing the finished version as the Christmas party was strictly limited to the office. He listened with his usual pipe and his usual patience, but he ruffled her by suggesting that she “sugar” it up with a sprinkle of Yuletide spirit.

“Why not come right out and ask me to recite ‘The Night Before Christmas'?” she asked frostily. “After all, it would be perfectly appropriate. The Surrogate used to say that it was his grandfather who had suggested the names of the reindeer to Mr. Moore.”

The finished draft, which her husband had found too sarcastic and she too mild, she began to have misgivings about on the day of the party itself. She had never taken much notice of these parties, at least since the Surrogate's day when he had used to open them with a lively and merry address, full of sly references to the younger lawyers, congratulating some for their past year's industry and exhorting others, though always with a Christmas twinkle in his eye, to greater efforts in the year to come. Mrs. Abercrombie in recent years had usually stayed but half an hour, sitting apart with Mrs. Grimshawe and consuming a small glass of ginger ale and a single watercress sandwich. When she took her leave she made her farewells only to Messrs. Tilney and Webb, the two senior partners, unless she happened to pass close to Rutherford Tower in which event she would shake hands with him as well. But this year, when she saw the office slowly assembling in the stenographic department where the party was held, and realized, as indeed was manifest in the splendid orchid that drooped from her shoulder and which had been sent by Tilney himself, that she would have to address that multitude, she became suddenly tense.

The desks had been pushed back to make a circular area for dancing in the center of which a lone accordionist was playing “White Christmas.” On top of the green file cabinets that jutted out from the walls various decorations had been strewn: small trees, paper hats, a sleigh with a Santa Claus and rather too many big red tissue-paper bells. Plates of hard-boiled eggs and turkey sandwiches covered Mrs. Grimshawe's desk, and on a long table with a green cloth cover the office boys mixed bourbon and ginger ale. It was generally supposed among the partners that the girls had a “field day” getting the place ready and that it was only right to let them have one afternoon a year in which they could turn a dreary masculine world into something more festive. But Mrs. Abercrombie knew better. Everybody was bored by the party. As the wise old Surrogate used to say, “We have to give the damn thing, not because anyone likes it, but because if we don't, they'll call us Scrooge & Marley.” Looking about the room, Mrs. Abercrombie concluded that it was more than ever like a children's party. The lawyers crowded together on one side of the bar, the girls on the other. A respectful group of the former listened to Mr. Webb's jokes. Mr. Tilney alone circulated, beaming to left and right. After the first forty minutes some of the younger stenographers started dancing with each other. Mrs. Abercrombie, realizing at last to the full that these were the people who would hear her speech, felt the sagging weight of depression in her legs and stomach.