Skinny Island (22 page)

Twice I tried to speak, but no sound emerged. Was this sleazy old sport always to have the last word? Then my voice erupted.

"That lips sanctified by hers should be so foul! You great clown, don't you know you have no existence except what Grace has given you? Go down a pothole, bug."

I hurried away from him and the loud angry screech of his astonished laugh.

And now I turn again to the letters.

Oh, my lover, however little I may have given you, be assured that it was all I had. Had I been wiser I might have hoarded it and doled it out in smaller portions, but I could not do so. I opened my vault, my doors, my cupboards, my windows; I flung every gold piece and copper piece that I had at your feet. Imprudent maybe, but I care not. I shall be forever grateful. When you look with the kindly patience of an uncle whose little niece still believes in Santa Claus, I'll murmur under my breath: "Bless you for not telling me he's a fable. Bless you for letting me pretend a little longer."

Grace! Really!

And I must read that in the
Hamilton Review
and the
Dartington Quarterly?

Well, yes, of course I must. For I cannot destroy or even conceal these letters. They must be entered in the record. I have been kidding myself; I've known that all along. If they will turn Grace Eliot's life into another of her novels, was it not to fiction that her destiny led her? And is it not, after all, only consistent with the justice meted out to mortals on this planet that I, who dedicated my genius to Grace Eliot, should have done less for her in the end than a man who merely unzipped his fly?

B
RENDAN BROSS,
Princeton '77, had intended to teach history, but after two years of graduate school he became engaged to be married, and he had to face the facts that America was an expensive place for raising families and academic jobs were in short supply. Accordingly, he abandoned his dreams of becoming the great scholar of the Byzantine empire and entered Columbia Law where, to his own surprise, he achieved high grades and an editorship of the law journal. On graduation he was offered a job in the Wall Street law firm of Nichols & Phelps, but his fiancée, who had now become a devoted social worker and a convert to Zen Buddhism, made their union contingent upon his turning down this job with "mammon." Brendan, objecting more to the imposition of the condition than to the condition itself, started work still a bachelor.

For a year this seemed just as well, for his hours were taxing. He did not mind for a time jumping into the heavy waters of bond indentures and registration statements, buffeting through days and nights and weekends the relentless breakers of galley proofs and computer printouts, because he assumed that one day he would be promoted to a position where he would be able to raise his head above the troubled surface and look over to a shore that might even contain cultural diversion, travel and, in time, a family life. But it began to strike him, as he came to know the firm better, that the intensity of industry was the same in the paneled parlor of the senior partner as it was in the whitewashed cubicle of the most junior paralegal. If there was no hell, there was also no heaven, only the endless purgatory of small print.

Well, what was wrong with that? Nothing, so long as
that
was what he wanted. But he had his doubts. Had the day passed when a man could succeed in a profession without becoming its slave? In the world where Brendan now began to think of himself as entrapped, he was borne along in the current of dedication. The men and women around him were forever droning about the number of billable hours they clocked per week. So long as they seemed doomed to be a chain gang, they must have chosen to glory in their shackles. To question the validity of a life dedicated to the apotheosis of money-making was to be guilty of heresy. So glorious indeed was the glittering gold at the apex of the corporate mountain that its mere reflection had to be reward enough for the toilers on the rocky slopes below, most of whom could not even expect to become partners of the law firms that were themselves mere handmaidens in the procession marching round and round that refulgent peak.

Or was this only Brendan's imagination? Was he losing his perspective?

A welcome change came into his life when Theodore Childe, the partner in charge of East River Trust Company, asked him to become his full-time assistant. Brendan welcomed the chance to specialize. He permitted himself to hope that once he had come to know one client and one partner intimately, there might at least be a visible constellation in that cloud-covered night sky of corporate operations.

And for some weeks, indeed, he thought he had reason to believe that he was fortunate to be working for Theodore Childe. His new boss was a straight, tall, stiff, handsome man with perfect features and a large serene brow that made his bald dome seem a crown rather than a disgrace. He was scrupulously, almost painfully neat, in his garb, in his chamber, in his very opinions. Yet he never seemed to demand an equal standard of tidiness in others. It was as if some angel or demon of his own had assigned to Theodore Childe the purely individual task of personal correctness. This might even have been, Brendan speculated, why Childe was so invariably pleasant and patient with those who worked for him. He seemed to recognize, in some curious fashion of his own, that they were not subject to the same discipline. He was almost apologetic when he corrected Brendan's work.

"There are many ways of phrasing a refunding clause," he would say, coming into his associate's office to place on his blotter a heavily blue-penciled draft on which his junior had worked a whole weekend. "I am sure that yours is as good as most, but if you don't mind looking at some of my stylistic preferences..."

And he would leave Brendan with an amended version of his work that represented a humiliating improvement. It was nonetheless an attractive way to be instructed, and Brendan prided himself that he responded well to it. Certainly the blue marks were soon diminishing on his drafts.

A change in his assessment of his superior was generated by the chance remark of another associate at lunch, one Jim Moher, merry, fat and (discreetly) irreverent.

"How are we getting on with Childe?" Jim asked.

"Pretty well, I guess. He seems easy enough to work with."

"Don't worry if he never gives you a compliment. That's not his way. He won't ever knock you, either. A thing is either right or it has to be done over. There's no place for praise. And none for abuse."

"Why is that?"

"Because clerks don't exist for him. They're simply tools."

"Well, he treats his tools better than some of his partners do."

"You know what the good workman doesn't blame."

"Ah, yes. It's true. He blames himself."

"Who else? There's no one but Childe in the world of Theodore Childe."

They were interrupted here by another associate who joined their table, and Brendan never asked his informant what he had meant. He knew that the latter was one of those who talked for effect, that he hated to have his ideas analyzed. Yet Brendan kept turning over in his mind Jim's loosely uttered thought in the weeks that followed. By luck or by inspiration his luncheon companion seemed to have hit upon an important aspect of Childe's personality.

When he lunched with Childe now, or when he dined, as he did on two occasions, at his dark, cold apartment, filled with heavy inherited furniture, to meet his big, hollow, uninteresting wife, Brendan noted how little change there was in the pleasant tone with which Childe dutifully took up, one by one, the topics of general interest headlined in the evening paper. It was as if he were thinking: "All right, now is the time of the social hour. In the social hour we discuss the events of the day. When the social hour is over we go back to work."

Did
anyone exist for Childe but Childe himself? Yet the man saw people. He saw his wife; he saw Brendan; he asked the questions necessary to show a proper human concern. But Brendan could not get away from an idea that now came to dominate his thinking about his boss: that Childe's social life was a routine that he obliged himself to go through, that the people in it were mere characters in a play who had had to learn their lines as he had had to learn his. Except no—perhaps Childe was the
only
actor, and the others marionettes whose strings were pulled by the angel (or demon) who was composing the lines of the comedy (or tragedy) of Theodore Childe.

Brendan lunched again with Jim Moher.

"You said none of us existed in Childe's world. Is that even true of his family and clients?"

Jim turned out to be a less casual observer of Childe than Brendan had supposed. He too had clerked for Brendan's boss, for several months. "I don't know so much about his family, though I suspect the dumb, yackety wife doesn't count for much. But the clients—or client—is another matter. He's only got one, hasn't he?"

"Certainly only one that I've ever worked for."

"East River Trust. Natch. That's his whole life. He grew up with the outfit. It was a small bank twenty years ago, but it's been swelled by mergers, and he's managed each time to hang on to the account. When they came here they insisted the firm take him in as a partner. It was a package deal."

"But Guide's a damn good lawyer."

Jim's mouth puckered into a circle of doubt. "He's a good enough draftsman. And he's accurate, I grant. But he's limited, specialized. If the firm ever lost that bank, they'd have no more room for Theodore Childe, and he knows it."

"But how did it all start? There must have been something in his life before East River."

Jim shrugged. "Who knows? The Childes were an old family who lost their shirts in twenty-nine. Theodore, from what I gather, grew up on handouts and scholarships in a grubby, faded-gentry kind of way. He latched on to that then-little bank as a life saver. And he's been hanging on for dear life ever since!"

Only a month after this interchange Brendan had cause to find out just how dedicated to his client Childe was. East River Trust was trustee under the will of Luke Selden, the late great pharmacist, and the trusts largely comprised stock in Selden Chemicals. To protect the trustee in its policy of keeping so many eggs in one basket—which for years had been of immense profit to the beneficiaries—East River Trust had settled its accounts judicially every five years. But at the very end of one of these periods a contraceptive pill produced by Selden had caused, or was believed to have caused, a spate of illnesses and even deaths; lawsuits had proliferated, the stock had crashed, and it was feared that the company might go into receivership. The beneficiaries of the Selden trusts, oblivious now of the vast benefits accrued to them by the policy of hanging on to the family stock, sued East River for a surcharge which, if granted, might cripple the bank.

Brendan found that once again, as before his selection by Childe, his waking hours were all devoted to his job, now the preparation of the defense. The firm's litigation department handled the court arguments and briefs, but the research was conducted by Childe and Brendan, who rapidly became experts in the science of contraception. Brendan was at first amused, then concerned and at last alarmed at the passion with which his leader attacked his task. Childe worked as long hours as his associate, tearing through files as if his very life were at stake. When he had any cause to refer to the plaintiffs or their counsel, his voice would assume a rasping bitterness.

"When you think of the years in which East River has taken such risks to enrich these useless parasites, don't you wonder that even such scabrous slugs as they are could have the gall to turn and rend their benefactor?"

"But, Mr. Childe, some of them are infants. Their guardians
have
to sue."

"Have to bite the hand that fed them? Don't give me that. And there are only two infants, anyway. How does that excuse the others?"

"Because if there
is
a surcharge, and they haven't sued, they can't share it."

"Poppycock! That's just an argument to excuse their rapacity. The kind of reasoning offered by shysters to induce greedy idiots to sue!"

Brendan did not pursue the discussion, as he could see that his superior was not quite rational on the subject, and, besides, Childe's animosity towards his opponents hardly affected the preparation of the case. But it did begin to appall him that the older man should put quite so much emotion into the fate of a bank. It was beginning to look now as if the case could probably be settled. The first flurry of motions over, there was less apparent danger that the bank would go under. Yet Childe continued to carry on as if the plaintiffs were doing something damnable in seeking redress from a trustee which had handled their portfolios in such a way as to reduce them by half.

As the days passed Brendan had even graver doubts. Was Childe's state of mind perhaps a thermometer that demonstrated how unhealthy was the moral state of the whole business world? Did these lawyers and bank officers and trust beneficiaries care about an art or a social cause or a war or a religion or even another human being as they cared about these questions of commissions and surcharges? And what was he, Brendan Bross, doing wasting his young years in other people's money battles that he did not even care about?

It was at this point, on a hot July day when the humidity outside seemed to penetrate the very ducts of the air conditioning, that Brendan came across what he was always thereafter to think of as
the
memorandum.

It recorded a discussion, at a private club in the city, between Rex Henderson, senior trust officer of East River, Theodore Childe and an economist, now deceased, one Dr. Slocum Oursley. Oursley had expressed his opinion very forcibly on the precarious nature of the drug business and the possibility of stomach poisoning from the use of certain types of vitamin pills. Attached to the memorandum was a page, written out apparently during the conference in the large handwriting of the doctor, in purple ink, giving examples of certain formulas used by Selden Chemicals that he felt to have inherent dangers. There was a third document in the file, apparently just for office purposes, signed with Childe's initials, and dated two years after the recorded discussion. It read: Word reached us today of Dr. Oursley's suicide, apparently in a fit of depression. He is now considered discredited and has for years been fulminating against the chemical companies.