Powers of Attorney (7 page)

When he got out of the cab, he took in with renewed pleasure the great façade. He knew it, of course. Everyone who ever walked on the east side of Central Park knew the eclectic architecture of the old Tyson house, rising from a Medicean basement through stories of solemnified French Renaissance to its distinguishing feature, a top-floor balcony in the form of the Porch of the Maidens. To Rutherford, it was simply the kind of house that one built if one was rich. He would have been only too happy to be able to do the same.

Fortunately, it proved as easy to see Colonel Hubert as it was difficult to get him on the telephone. The old butler who opened the massive grilled door, and whose voice Rutherford immediately recognized, led him without further questions, when he heard he was actually dealing with the Colonel's lawyer, up the grey marble stairway that glimmered in the dark hall and down a long corridor to the Colonel's study. This was Italian; Rutherford had a vague impression of red damask and tapestry as he went up to the long black table at which an old man was sitting, reading a typewritten sheet. He sighed in relief. It
was
the right colonel.

“Good morning, Colonel. I'm Tower. Rutherford Tower. Do you remember me? About your will?”

The Colonel looked up with an expression of faint puzzlement, but smiled politely. “My dear fellow, of course. Pray be seated.”

“I wanted to tell you that I've thought it over, and that I'm all set to start,” Rutherford went on quickly, taking a seat opposite the Colonel. “There are a few points, however, I'd like to straighten out.”

The Colonel nodded several times. “Ah, yes, my will,” he said. “Exactly. Very good of you.”

“I want to get the names of your grandnephews. I think it advisable to leave them more substantial legacies in view of the fact that the residue is going to your foundation. And then there's the question of executors ...” He paused, wondering if the Colonel was following him. The old man was now playing with a large bronze turtle—the repository of stamps and paper clips—raising and lowering its shell. “That's a handsome bronze you have there,” Rutherford said uncertainly.

“Isn't it?” the Colonel said, holding it up. “I'd like Sophie to have it. She always used to admire it. You might take her name down. Sophie Winters, my wife's niece. Or did she take back her own name after her last divorce?” He looked blankly at Rutherford. “Anyway, she's living in Biarritz. Unless she sold that house that Millie left her. Did she, do you know?”

Rutherford took a deep breath. Whatever happened, he must not be impatient again. “If I might suggest, sir, we could take care of the specific items more easily in a letter. A letter to be left with your will.”

The Colonel smiled his charming smile. “I'd like to do it the simple way myself, of course. But would it be binding? Isn't that the point? Would it be binding?”

“Well, not exactly,” Rutherford admitted, “but, after all, such a request is hardly going to be ignored—”

“How can we be sure? Do you see?” the Colonel said, smiling again. “Now, I tell you what we'll do. I'll ring for my man, Tomkins, and we'll get some luggage tags to tie to the objects marked for the different relatives.”

Rutherford sat helpless as the Colonel rang, and told Tomkins what he wanted. When the butler returned with the tags, he gave them to the Colonel and then took each one silently from him as the old man wrote a name on it. He then proceeded gravely to tie it to a lamp or a chair or to stick it with Scotch tape to the frame of a picture or some other object. Both he and the Colonel seemed quite engrossed in their task and entirely unmindful of Rutherford, who followed them about the study, halfheartedly writing down the name of the fortunate niece who was to receive the Luther Terry “Peasant Girl” or the happy cousin who was to get the John Rogers group. By lunchtime, the study looked like a naval vessel airing its signal flags. The Colonel surveyed the whole with satisfaction.

“Well!” he exclaimed, turning to Rutherford. “I guess that's that for today! All work and no play, you know. Come back tomorrow, my dear young man, and we'll do the music room.”

Rutherford, his pockets rustling with useless notes, walked down Fifth Avenue, too overwrought to go immediately back to the office. He stopped at his club and had an early drink in the almost empty bar, calculating how long at this rate it would take them to do the whole house. And what about the one on Long Island? And how did he know there mightn't be another in Florida? It was suddenly grimly clear that unless he managed to get the Colonel out of this distressing new mood of particulars and back to his more sweeping attitude of the day before, there might never be any will at all. And, looking at his own pale face in the mirror behind the bar, he drew himself up and ordered another drink. What was it that Clitus Tilney always said was the mark of a good lawyer—creative imagination?

At his office, after lunch, he went to work with a determination that he had not shown since the Benzedrine weekend, fifteen years before, when he took his bar examinations. He kept his office door closed, and snapped “Keep out, please!” to each startled young man who banged it open to get to the real estate safe. He even had the courage to seize one of them, a Mr. Baitsell, and demand his services. When Baitsell protested, Rutherford asserted himself as he had not done since his uncle's death. “I'm sorry. This is emergency,” he said.

Once obtained, Baitsell was efficient. He dug out of the files a precedent for a simple foundation for medical purposes and, using it as a guide, drafted that part of the will himself while Rutherford worked out the legacies for the grandnephews. This was a tricky business, for the bequests had to be large enough to induce the young Huberts not to contest the will. There were moments, but only brief ones, when he stopped to ponder the morality of what he was doing. Was it
his
responsibility to pass on the Colonel's soundness of mind? Did he know it to be unsound? And whom, after all, was he gypping? If the old man died without a will, the grandnephews would take everything, to be sure, but everything minus taxes. All he was really doing with his foundation was shifting the tax money from the government, which would waste it, to a charity, which wouldn't. If that wasn't “creative imagination,” he wanted to know what was! And did anyone think for a single, solitary second that in his position Clitus Tilney would not have done what he was doing? Why, he would probably have made himself residuary legatee! With this thought, Rutherford, after swallowing two or three times, penciled his own name in the blank space for “executor” on the mimeographed form he was using.

The following morning at ten, Rutherford went uptown with his secretary and Mr. Baitsell to take the Colonel, as he now knew was the only way, by storm. While the other two waited in the hall, he followed the butler up the stairs and down the corridor to the study. Entering briskly, he placed a typed copy of the will on the desk before the astonished old gentleman.

“I've been working all night, Colonel,” he said, in a voice so nervous that he didn't quite recognize himself, “and I've decided that it doesn't pay to be too much smarter than one's client—particularly when that client happens to be Colonel Hubert. All of which means, sir, that you were right the first time. My scheme of including in the will all those bequests of objets d'art just isn't feasible. We'll accomplish the same thing in a letter. And in the meanwhile here's your will as you originally wanted it. Clean as a whistle.”

The Colonel watched him, nodding vaguely, and fingered the pages of the will. “You think it's all right?”

“Right as Tower, Tilney & Webb can make it,” Rutherford said, with the smile and wink that he had seen Clitus Tilney use.

“And you think I should sign it now?”

“No time like the present.” Rutherford, who had been too nervous to sit, walked to the window, to conceal his heavy breathing. “If you'll just ring for Tomkins and ask him to tell the young lady and gentleman in the hall to come up, we'll have the necessary witnesses.”

“Is Tomkins covered all right?” the Colonel asked as he touched the bell beside him.

“He's covered with the other servants,” Rutherford said hastily. “In my opinion, sir, you've been more than generous.”

The witnesses came up, and the Colonel behaved better than Rutherford had dared hope. He joked with Baitsell about the formalities, laughed at the red ribbon attached to the will, told a couple of anecdotes about old Newport and Harry Lehr's will, and finally signed his name in a great, flourishing hand. When Rutherford's secretary walked up to the table to sign her name after his, he rose and made her a courtly bow. It was all like a scene from Thackeray.

In the taxi afterward, speeding downtown, Rutherford turned to the others. “The Colonel's a bit funny about his private affairs,” he told them. “As a matter of fact, I haven't even met his family. So I'd rather you didn't mention this will business. Outside the office
or
in.”

Baitsell looked very young and impressed as he gave him his solemn assurance. He then asked, “But if the Colonel should die, sir, who would notify us? And how would the family know about the will?”

“Never mind about that,” Rutherford said, with a small smile, handing him the will. “I don't think the Colonel is apt to do very much dying without my hearing of it. When we get to the office, you stick that will in the vault and forget it.”

It was risky to warn them, of course, but riskier not to. He couldn't afford to have them talk. There was too much that was phony in the whole picture. He had no guaranty, after all, that the Colonel had either the money or the power to will it. It was the kind of situation where one had to lie low, at least until the old man was dead, and even after that, until it was clear that one had the final and valid will. How would he look, for example, rushing into court to probate the document now under Baitsell's arm if the family produced a later will, or even a judicial ruling that the old man was incompetent to make one? Would he not seem ridiculous and grabby? Or worse? And Clitus Tilney! What would
he
say if his firm was dragged into so humiliating a failure? But no, no, he wouldn't even think of it. He could burn the will secretly, if necessary; nobody need know unless—well, unless he won. And his heart bounded as he thought of the paneled office that Tilney would have to assign to the director of the Hubert Foundation.

A new office was only the first of many imaginative flights in which he riotously indulged. He saw himself dispensing grants to universities and hospitals, called on, solicited, profusely thanked. He calculated and recalculated his executor's commissions on increasingly optimistic estimates of the Colonel's estate. In fact, his concept of the old man's wealth and his own control of it, the apotheosis of Rutherford Tower to the position of benefactor of the city,
the
Tower at long last of Tower, Tilney & Webb, began, in the ensuing months, to edge out the more real prospect of disappointment. The fantasy had become too important not to be deliberately indulged in. When he turned at breakfast to the obituary page, he would close his eyes and actually pray that he would not find the name there, so that he would have another day in which to dream.

When the Colonel did die, it was Phyllis, of course, who spotted it. “I see that old Colonel Bill is dead,” she said at breakfast one morning, without looking up from her newspaper. “Eighty-seven. Didn't you say he'd been in to see you?”

For a moment, Rutherford sat utterly still. “Where did he die?” he asked.

“In some lawyer's office in Miami. So convenient, I should imagine. They probably had all his papers ready. Why, Rutherford, where are you going?”

He didn't trust himself to wait, and hurried out. In the street, he bought copies of all the newspapers and went to a Central Park bench to read them. There was little more in any of the obituaries than the headlines: “Former Army Officer Stricken” or “Husband of Mrs. J. L. Tyson Succumbs.” He could find nothing else about the Miami lawyer. After all, he reasoned desperately as he got up and walked through the Mall, wasn't it only natural for the Colonel to have Florida counsel? Didn't he spend part of the year there? But, for all his arguments, it was almost lunchtime before he gathered courage to call his office. His secretary, however, had to report only that Aunt Mildred Tower had called twice and wanted him to call back.

“Tell her I'm tied up,” he said irritably. “Tell her I've gone to the partners' lunch.”

For, indeed, it was Monday, the day of their weekly lunch. When he got to the private room of the Down Town where they met, he found some twenty of them at the table, listening to Clitus Tilney. Rutherford assumed, as he slipped into a chair at the lower end of the table, that the senior partner was telling one of his usual stories to illustrate the greatness of Clitus and the confounding of his rivals. But this story, as he listened to it with a growing void in his stomach, appeared to be something else.

“No, it's true, I'm not exaggerating,” Tilney was saying, with a rumbling laugh. “There are twenty-five wills that they know of already, and they're not all in by a long shot. Sam Kennecott, at Standard Trust, told me it was a mania with the old boy. And the killing thing is, they're all the same. Except for one that has forty-five pages of specific bequests, they all set up some crazy foundation under the control of—guess who—the little shyster who drew the will! Sam says you've never seen such an accumulation of greed in your life! In my opinion, they ought to be disbarred, the lot of them, for taking advantage of the poor old dodo. Except the joke's on them—that's the beauty of it!”

Rutherford did not have to ask one of his neighbors the name of the deceased, but, feeling dazed, he did. The neighbor told him.