Skinny Island (24 page)

"And Brendan Bross becomes a junior partner!" he cried.

Phelps's explosive laughter seemed to carry a note of triumph. "Ah, dear fellow, you can't really think me such an ass as that! To
push
you into rushing to the judge with the last smitch of doubt removed from your fatuous heroism? Oh, no, my friend, I shan't help you like
that.
The moral choice is yours and yours alone. You will have no idea how your acting or not acting will affect your future in this firm. You will have no idea because I have no idea. I shall not speak of your memorandum to our opponents because I do not believe it existed.
You
do, so you have the problem. How you solve it is up to your own conscience."

"But—"

"Good day, sir!"

Brendan wondered afterwards, alone in his office, his throbbing head in his hands, if the old ham actor really got a kick out of anything but his own performances.

The next day Brendan conferred with plaintiffs' counsel, and the day after that he was interrogated in court about the lost memorandum. His firm promptly took him off the case, but he was not discharged. However, when on the afternoon after his testimony he returned to the office none of the partners or associates did more than coldly nod to him in the passageways. Nobody crossed his threshold. He was obviously regarded as a dangerous lunatic.

Their attitude changed, however, when Mr. Henderson of East River was called. He was the trust officer who, according to the memorandum, had been present at the conference at the Metropolitan Club with Childe and Oursley. He made a nervous and stammering witness, but under relentless examination he at last confirmed that the conference had indeed been held, that Oursley had indeed made notes in purple ink which he handed to Childe, and that Childe had told Henderson he would send him a memo of the meeting but never had.

A newspaper article the next day raised the question of disbarment proceedings against Theodore Childe. The following morning at six a.m. Childe jumped from a bathroom window of his apartment and fell ten stories to the pavement.

In the ultimate settlement of the suit against East River Trust the general opinion was that the undiscovered memorandum about the vitamin pills had been of little or no importance.

Brendan, propped up in his bed in his bare single room at the psychiatric division of the Yorkville Hospital, kept his head turned away from the neat pile of untouched books and magazines on his table and maintained his steady gaze over the sluggish river and the rapidly moving craft that plied their accustomed way up and down it. He was well enough now to go out once a day and trudge along the pedestrians' walk without anyone's fearing that he might try to jump in.

He was also well enough to have visitors, and he had one now in the person of none less than the senior partner of the law firm with which he was not sure that he was still associated.

Mr. Phelps, perhaps having been instructed by the nurse to discourse on neutral topics, was holding forth, a bit fa-tiguingly, on the ludicrous minor details of a vast antitrust suit in which the firm was engaged. But suddenly he stopped. Suddenly he blustered his way boldly into an area that he must surely have been warned away from.

"When I was young my mother suffered from depressions. I used to wonder why she couldn't pull herself together. Why she didn't simply snap out of it. I suppose children are inclined to be unsympathetic. I've always had to watch my step with depressed people since."

Brendan smiled. "That sounds more as if you were trying shock treatment."

"Well, I don't believe you're really depressed. In the medical sense, anyway. You have what is called a 'real' worry. You blame yourself for Childe's death."

"Don't you blame me? Didn't you as much as warn me?"

"Perhaps. But you did what you had to do. The fact that Childe died of it has nothing to do with your duty. He chose to die. If a man elects to do what
he
did and then prefers to die rather than face the consequences, why is that a thing for you to worry about?"

Brendan took in, wonderingly, the other's matter-of-fact expression. "But suppose, sir, I was not motivated by duty? Suppose I was venting my spleen against the whole world of law? Suppose I wanted to make an issue of my disgust at seeing the best lawyers of the land dedicate their talents and morals to the simple business of oiling the machinery of money-grabbing? Suppose I wanted to see Theodore Childe's head tumble into the basket, like a
tricoteuse
in the French Revolution?" Brendan's voice rose to a high note, but it occurred to him that he was forcing it, and he at once became silent. Was he trying to convince Phelps that he
was
ill? Was he trying to convince himself?

"What does it matter what your motives were? What you did you had to do. Your thought processes and your act were two distinct and independent things. Suppose in your mind you want to kill John Jones. But you don't do so. You don't even show him your animosity. And then suppose John Jones goes berserk and hijacks a school bus and you're a cop and have to kill him to save the kids. Does it matter that you wanted to do it anyway?"

"It seems to me, sir," Brendan said slowly, keeping a grave eye on Phelps, "that you're begging the whole question. You say I
had
to do what I did. But did I? Would you have done it?"

"Certainly, in your situation."

"You astound me. I thought you were advising me not to do it on that day when I consulted you."

"I was simply analyzing the situation. I was not in your shoes. You will recall that I told you I did not believe that Childe had destroyed that memorandum."

"But that wasn't true. You
did
believe it."

Phelps met Brendan's stare without flinching. Then he chuckled. "All right, yes. We both know I did."

"Then why were you not in my shoes?"

"Because I hadn't, like you,
seen
the memorandum. I had only your word for it."

"But you believed my word."

"That is a purely subjective matter. Did I have a right to believe it? Was it reasonable for me to take the word of an associate I hardly knew against that of a partner whom I had known and trusted for twenty years? Was that doing my duty to a client? Oh, no, my friend, I did not have the presumption to substitute my inner hunch of what had really happened for the presumption of right conduct that my partner surely deserved."

"So that is the law," Brendan mused. "And if you had been I and had seen the memorandum you would have done as I did?"

"Precisely."

"And yet you tried to talk me out of it!"

"Well, you see, it wasn't
my
duty to do it. It was my duty to my client to avoid, if possible, the whole bloody mess."

"Even at the price of talking me out of doing
my
duty?"

"Well, if you were weak-minded, didn't I owe it to East River Trust to work on your weak mind?"

"Good God, could things be that simple?"

"It makes life easier to live, doesn't it? And isn't life hard enough without making it harder? When will you be coming back to work, Brendan?"

"You mean you want me to?"

"Why not? Everyone admires you for your guts. East River fired us, as you know, but they're not too displeased with the outcome of the case, and I think they're beginning to realize that Childe's act hadn't hurt them as much as they thought it had. It's true they panicked and lost a few points in the settlement, but that was their fault. They may come back to us, now that Childe is gone. And if they don't, hell, there are other banks. And the world has a very short memory."

"But even if that is so, what about all I've told you about what I think of the practice of law?"

"Oh, that." Phelps rose now, as if ready to conclude his visit. "Well, that's the way I feel about it myself. Come, Brendan, you and I didn't make the world."

And Brendan, left alone, gazed again out his window at the dirty gray of the rippling river under the serene blue of the early spring sky and wondered if all his fears and fancies did not belong to an episode in a television ghost series. Were they simply his "twilight zone"? But even if they were, might they not be preferable to the bleak realism of the senior partner? Brendan's trouble—oh, how he saw it now!—was that he had nothing to combat that realism with.

I
FIRST MET
Peter Chisholm in the winter of 1981 when we were both single men, considerably in view on the Manhattan social scene, both in our late forties, he divorced and I separated. But that was the extent of our greatest common denominator. In all other points we were near opposites. I was a native-born New Yorker, of staidly respectable New England antecedents, while his were undisclosed. Lithuanian? Jewish? A touch of the Tatar? All we knew of his background was that he had attended high school in Hoboken. But if his social and ethnic origins were shadowy, his present was nonetheless glittering. While I labored in a small art gallery on Madison Avenue in which I had purchased an even smaller interest with my whole inheritance, he was the leading partner in a firm of investment bankers and known throughout town as the "avenging angel" of the corporate takeover.

His appearance proclaimed his formidability. He was stocky and muscular, if on the short side, with bulging shoulders, a square face with distrustful little green eyes and thick, short, stubby yellow hair. His voice, however, was mild, almost velvety, faintly mocking, guardedly friendly. He never seemed to raise it or to lose his equanimity. His anger, if anger he ever felt, was expressed in quick snorts of laughter.

Since his divorce, some years back, from a woman whom none of my friends seem to have known, he lived in a large penthouse on Central Park West filled with the eclectic collection of art that evidenced the constant changes of his taste. It was through this collection that we had become friends—if such a term could describe any relationship with Peter. The only reason that, as a dealer, I survived his fickleness was that my gallery covered a wide range of artifacts. Peter would pace up and down the main show-room with curiosity and suspicion. Was it all just so much wallpaper? Or was it a business to take over?

"What is this?" he asked me once, pointing to the portrait of a lady in a straight, white, high-necked gown with a turban.

"A Vigée-Lebrun. And a very fine one. Just the thing to go in your dining room over the George II silver."

"You really think she's my sort of picture?"

"Why not? Isn't she graceful?"

"Don't I need something sweller?"

"Sweller? She's a grand duchess."

"You mean a Russian? Why would a French painter have done a grand duchess?"

"Because Madame Vigée-Lebrun, very sensibly, emigrated from France during the revolution and went to Moscow where she made a fortune painting the imperial court. She must have been a kind of female Peter Chisholm."

He eyed the portrait now with greater respect. But then he sniffed: "I'll bet she's out of fashion. Would Meyer Shapiro approve of Vigée-Lebrun?"

"I doubt she's his affair. Should I care about that? We dealers know that fashion is king. Vigée-Lebrun was fashionable once. She'll come back. Everything comes back. Everything, that is, with some basic artistic merit."

"How do you spot that?"

"Ah, that's a dealer's eye."

"And you have it?"

"I have a bit of it. If a picture catches my fancy, I don't stop to write an essay on why. I make a bid. Maybe it's a Bouguereau. Or an Alma-Tadema. Or a Kandinsky. Or a Cy Twombly. I don't care. Does it speak to me? That's all I ask. And the only other principle is never to dump. That's what warehouses are for. If it hit your eye once, it may hit it again. Hang on to it!"

"Are you making a fortune? Like Vigée—whatever her name is?"

"Well, I might if I owned more of this shop. But I have only a very small share."

"Maybe I should invest in it," Peter said thoughtfully.

It was on another of these visits that Peter met my wife, with whom I had remained on friendly terms. Abby used to drop into the gallery at times when there were apt to be no customers, or only "browsers," at, say, ten o'clock in the morning, and she would sit on the edge of my desk, smoking, swinging one of her long legs, the absurdly high heel of her slipper tapping against its side, her long blond hair falling across her cheek as she voiced her sharp, terse opinions on everything and everyone. Abby represented a rather rickety bridge between a generation of New York women that was still content with society and social work and one that was concerned with jobs and professions. She was bored with social life and at the same time irritated that her juniors had ceased to take it seriously. She was too old and too lazy to learn a profession, and she liked to imagine that she had wasted the best years of her life trying to make a home for me, which was absurd, as I had always been perfectly content with my books and gallery. Of course I was egocentric and selfish myself, but certainly no more so than she. I had created my own happiness. Why couldn't she?

No sooner had I introduced Peter than they struck up a kind of humorous alliance against myself. He pointed to a painting of a French interior that I had placed on an easel for his better perusal.

"Your husband, Mrs. Day, thinks I should buy this. No doubt he brought it down from the attic when he suspected I'd be dropping in. Don't you think it has a kind of attic look?"

Abby took in the viewer appraisingly before she turned to the canvas. It was obvious that she was interested in Peter; women usually were. She glanced briefly at the quiet Gallic salon with its gray panels, its commode and bergères, and the window opening to the edge of a formal garden.

"Well, if you like Walter Gay," she said with a shrug.

"Oh, you knew it was a Walter Gay. Tell me about Walter Gay."

"He did his friends' châteaux, as you see. He was one of those exquisite expatriates of Edith Wharton's world. He could paint, I admit. Lucian likes his things because there are no people in them. You don't even feel that anyone's just left the room. They are totally empty. Voids."