Powers of Attorney (23 page)

“I wouldn't suggest this to everybody,” Webb told her, “but I have a feeling that you could see it through. My theory is that Georgette is coming to the end of her rope. She can't marry Gwinnett so long as she won't recognize the divorce, and if she waits much longer, she may lose him. She dare not risk that. What we need now is a bit more pressure in the right place to crack her. I suggest that you bring suit in Nassau County asking custody of your grandchildren on the grounds that her relations with Gwinnett make her an unfit mother.”

Mrs. Hobart remained still and expressionless, but her eyes showed a faint reptilian glimmer. “Could we prove it?”

“We could give them a run for their money. You never can tell what we may turn up in a trial, with evidence of allnight drinking parties and things like that.”

“There've been plenty of those,” Mrs. Hobart said grimly. “And you can count on me all the way.”

Which, indeed, he found he could. The custody suit moved the Hobart divorce from the gossip columns onto the front page, and the public began to take sides. Letters flowed into Webb's office, some hysterically accusing him of persecuting an innocent woman, others lauding him for upholding, in a decadent era, the remnants of a moral code. The photographs of the senior Mrs. Hobart reflected the opinions of the editors. In some she appeared like a savage old witch, who must have wanted the children only to put them in her oven; in others she looked noble and sad, as if forced out of a well-earned retirement to face bravely the mud of a lawsuit to save her posterity. Georgette, in similar fashion, was shown either at El Morocco in a paper hat blowing a whistle, or hiding her face with a handbag as, weeping, she hurried into the courthouse in Mineola for a pretrial examination. Peyton telephoned daily from California, worried about what “Ma” was going through, and if Webb had not feared that Cup might be tapping the wire, he would have replied that she was having the time of her life.

It was a war in which victory was bound to go to the side that could hold out for the last fifteen minutes, which made it the greater torture for Webb when Hobart, despite all his lawyer's passionate telephone invocations and encouraging epistles, collapsed. Olive could not abide California; she had to return to New York, and Peyton, driven to desperation and not daring to express his surrender orally or by letter, sent a peremptory telegram, demanding a settlement with Georgette. Webb, disgusted and wrathful, sat in his office in silent gloom for half an hour before he finally asked his secretary to call Cup.

“But he's here, Mrs. Webb,” she told him. “He's been waiting in the reception room for fifteen minutes. You said you would see nobody.”

“Send him in, for the love of Mike!'”

The moment Cup appeared in the doorway, Webb knew that he had won. He was too old a hand in the art of appearances not to recognize that defiant, sulking half-grin and the furtive glitter of those eyes. As he rose to usher his opponent to a seat, his heart went out to a fighter betrayed as he himself had been.

“Mr. Webb,” Cup began in a wistful, reflective tone, “I've come to make one last effort to see if you and I can't straighten out this sorry mess. I think the time has come for us to rise above partisanship and to consider the real victims of this tragedy: two small, helpless children, who are going to be scarred for life by what has happened already.”

Webb nodded gravely and admiringly. It was exactly the opening which he had planned for his own appeal. “You're right, Mr. Cup. I was telling my client only last week that the children were the greatest sufferers. I think we should each be prepared to give a little for their sakes.”

“I'm very happy to hear you say that, Mr. Webb. In fact, anticipating that you might take the larger view, I have come armed with a few propositions.”

And then, in half an hour, they proceeded to settle a dispute that had lasted for a year and entailed no less than six separate lawsuits. Webb conceded the custody of the children which Peyton had never really wanted, and Cup reduced his demands for money which the future Mrs. Gwinnett was never going to need. A new divorce action would be entered, and the senior Mrs. Hobart leashed. There remained only the question of fees, and for this discussion Webb and Cup lit cigars and settled back to view each other with now friendly eyes. It was immediately agreed that Peyton would pay both lawyers. The husband, in such cases, always did.

“I've been over my time sheets,” Cup said with a sigh, “and even cutting the wretched business to cost, I don't see how I can do it for less than thirty-five.”

Webb took a long puff of his cigar and closed one eye as he stared at his crystal inkwell. Thirty-five thousand was what he had decided to charge Peyton, exclusive of out-of-state counsel costs, but it was preferable to be able to show him that he was charging less than Georgette's lawyer. “I presume that doesn't include the custody suit.”

Cup's expression betrayed surprise only in that it betrayed nothing. “Oh, of course, not,” he said promptly. “I shall want another seventy-five hundred for that.”

Webb put down his cigar carefully and slowly rose to his feet. “Mr. Cup,” he said as he extended his hand across the desk, “I think we have a deal.”

As they shook hands warmly, they might have been two old veteran soldiers, emerging from opposing trenches, having fought each other long and well, to embrace on the morning of an armistice brought about by politicians behind the lines, an armistice that was, in the bitter opinion of each, a disgrace to both their nations.

 

A year and a half later Waldron Webb made one of his rare excursions into the countryside to attend the firm outing which was held annually, under the auspices of Clitus Tilney, at the Glenville Beach Club on Long Island's north shore. Webb always dreaded these outings, as he had never played golf or tennis, hated the water and did not wish to become identified with the small, repulsive, story-swapping group that spent the afternoon in the bar. He was the kind of lawyer who was happy only in his home, in his office or in court, and it was not pleasant to be protected and entertained by an expansive and condescending Tilney, perspiring after eighteen holes on the golf course, who seemed to find the rewards of a successful professional life, as manifested in the gleaming yellow pavilion and red umbrellas of his club, as exhilarating as the work itself. Yes, Tilney, taking his arm for a stroll down the terrace, Tilney, pointing out his eminent fellow members lying about on the sand, Tilney laughing loudly at remarks of Webb that he hadn't quite heard, might be treating him as a co-consul of the little empire of Towner, Tilney & Webb, but wasn't it the treatment that the aging and muscular, the still romantic Mark Antony, had meted out to a stout and puffing Lepidus?

“Now there's a sight that ought to interest you, Waldron,” Tilney said, pausing and waving an arm towards a group of children playing in the sand by what appeared to be two pairs of parents. Under the umbrellas, all in bathing suits, with pails and shovels for the children and cocktails for the adults, they made up a gay and colorful group. On the porch nearby two large grey, black-hooded baby carriages with shining spoked wheels were being rocked by two nurses in white. “Don't you recognize your old client?”

Webb stared into the group until he made out the familiar boyish features, under the dark suntan and over the unfamiliar brown bare lissome torso, of Peyton Hobart.

“Is that his new wife with him?”

“His new wife?” Tilney tilted his head back and let out his high, mocking laugh. “Bless you, my friend, it's
both
his wives. Let me read you the dramatis personae, starting from left to right. It's a lesson in Long Island mores!” Tilney cleared his throat and proceeded to point boldly from one figure to the next. “Over here, we have two infants, tended by two expensive white-robed presences. They are little Olive Hobart, child of your client and his second spouse, and little Button Gwinnett, named for the ancestral signer, child of Georgette and Tommy. Playing near the carriages are Tommy Gwinnett's three daughters by his first wife, the two Marsden boys, and the Hobart boy and girl over whose custody you raised such a rumpus. Turning now to the adults, you will observe how peace and concord have returned at last to the shores of Long Island Sound. The four individuals drinking gin in the bright sunlight and laughing the laughter of youth, are, besides your client, the following: his present wife, Olive, his former wife, Georgette, and her present husband, Tommy Gwinnett.”

Webb stared in fascination at that beautiful, promiscuous, near-naked quartet, with their host of beautiful, near-naked children. Who would have believed that a scant eighteen months before they had been engaged in no less than six bitter lawsuits? And now, with children tumbling over each other and over them (children who hardly knew, perhaps, which adult was a parent and which a stepparent), laughing and sipping gin, making jokes, perhaps, of their old days of discord, making jokes—oh, agony to think of!—of their “little men downtown” who had taken their squabbles with such amusing, passionate seriousness, they might have been the foreground in an advertisement of an exotic foreign car, so congenial, so gay, so pearly-toothed, did they all appear.

“Rabbits,” he muttered angrily to his partner as they turned back to the club house. “They're nothing but rabbits. People like that don't deserve the time the courts waste over them. They should do their breeding without the sanction of law!”

T
HE
K
IPS
always boasted that their blood was the finest in New York. They had managed to restrict it, since the eighteenth century, to the small group of families that had then been considered Manhattan society. The temptation to wade out, as the sand dried, into the endless waves of new fortunes that lapped the city had been sternly resisted. A Kip lady had been denied to a nephew of Mayor Hone in the 1830's and a Kip gentleman to a Gould heiress a half century later. Even Standard Oil would not do for the Kips, even the House of Morgan. There had been a now legendary Miss Kip, not blessed in looks or fortune, who seated alone at a ball had rejected the proffered introductions of her hostess, saying: “Thank you so much, but I'm perfectly happy sitting here and thinking what everyone in this room would give for one drop of my old Kip blood!” The Kips wanted to be left alone, and their wish had been gratified.

Inevitably, they became too numerous to be supported forever by the bit of old farmland in downtown Manhattan on which a famous office building squatted. Long before the disaster of 1929 “Kip Keep,” the turreted shingle castle of the Beekman Kips in Newport had been razed, and the tall gabled matching Dutch houses on Madison Avenue of the Tyler Kip sons converted to stores. By the middle of our century the male Kips were mostly at work, as lawyers or brokers or insurance salesmen. They still managed to send their children to private schools and to get out of town in the summer, but where were the marks to set them aside from the crowd? Where were the distinguishing features?

These were the questions that disturbed Bayard Kip, who as a tax expert and, at thirty-four, an about-to-be partner in Tower, Tilney & Webb was considered the prodigy of the family. But what was a Bayard Kip who had to help his wife with the dishes and take his children to the park on Sundays? What was a Bayard Kip who had to hire a sitter when he went out in the evening and whose apartment rang with television phrases? Were there not thousands such? Was not this fatal competence in adaptation more extinguishing to a family than any other quality? Bayard might polish and repolish his London shoes and wear waistcoats throughout the hottest summer; he might roll his umbrella until it was as thin as a cane and wear the darkest suits and the darkest ties—it was all no use. The face that looked back at him in the morning from his grandfather's mahogany-framed shaving mirror had none of the highcheekboned, hooknosed superciliousness of a colonial governor, none of what Bayard's grandmother, pronouncing it in French, had called
race.
It was a mild, soft-eyed, square-jawed, straightnosed, blemishless American face. It might have been looking at him from across a soda fountain.

The government agents and auditors with whom he had to work seemed equally unaware that he had any particular claim to distinction. They found him reserved, impassive, even “stuffy,” but his patience with every demand, his quiet reasonableness in argument and his clear, exact mind for figures made him a popular lawyer to deal with. One of the agents, a hard-fisted, cynical Irishman, Tommy Reardon, became almost a friend. Reardon was intrigued by Bayard's economic philosophy which he liked to describe as somewhat to the right of Louis XIV.

“Does it never occur to you,” he asked Bayard at lunch after they had completed auditing a great building contractor's return, “that there's something wrong with a country whose best brains are spent in attacking and defending the shenanigans of an old trickster like Inka Dahduh?”

“You will understand that I must disassociate myself from any such description of a client,” Bayard replied in a cool but unindignant tone.

“You know what Dahduh is! Far better than I. A man who never went to school, much less college. A man whose highest ideal is to give nothing for something! Yet here we are, two well-educated, thinking men with consciences and ideals, utterly absorbed in his shifty little deals. You trying to sweep them under the rug and I to sweep them out!”

“I have swept nothing of Mr. Dahduh's under the rug,” Bayard insisted.

“All right, leave him out of it. Let's just say a client. Surely you won't maintain that
all
your clients are angels?”

“Let me put it this way,” Bayard said, after a moment of judicious reflection. “I believe that all the returns which I have prepared—or which have been prepared under my supervision—represent an honest disclosure of the pertinent facts.”