The Collected Stories of Louis Auchincloss (11 page)

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 buder 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.

“Did any of the big firms get hooked?” someone asked.

“Good Lord, we have
some
ethics, I hope!” Tilney answered. “Though there's a rumor that one did. Harrison & Lambert, someone said. Wouldn't it be wonderful?” Tilney's large jowls positively shook with pleasure. “What wouldn't I give to see old Cy Lambert caught like a monkey with his fist in the bottle!”

Rutherford spoke up suddenly. His voice was so high that everyone turned and looked at him. “But what about the man with the
last
will?” he called down the table to Mr. Tilney. “Why is it a joke on him?”

“You mean the man in Miami?” Tilney said, flashing at Rutherford the fixed smile of his dislike. “Because the old guy didn't have that sort of money. Not foundation money. The big stuff was all in trust, of course, and goes to the Tysons, where it should go.”

Rutherford concentrated on eating a single course. It would look odd, after his interruption, to leave at once. When he had emptied his plate, he wiped his mouth carefully, excused himself to his neighbors, and walked slowly from the room.

Back at the office, however, he almost dashed to Baitsell's room. Closing the door behind him, he faced the startled young man with wild eyes. “Look, Baitsell, about that will of Colonel Hubert's—you'remember.” Baitsell nodded quickly. “Well, he died, you see.”

“Yes, sir. I read about it.”

“Apparently, he's written some subsequent wills. I think we'd better do nothing about filing ours for the time being. And if I were you I wouldn't mention this around the office. It might—”

“But it's already filed, sir!”

“It's
what?
”

“Yes, sir. I filed it.”

“How could you?” Rutherford's voice was almost a scream. “You haven't had time to prepare a petition, let alone get it signed!”

“Oh, I don't mean that I filed it for probate, Mr. Tower. I mean I filed it for safekeeping in the Surrogate's Court.
Before
he died. The same day he signed it.”

Rutherford, looking into the young man's clear, honest eyes, knew now that he faced the unwitting agent of his own devil. “Why did you do that?” he asked in a low, almost curious tone. “We never do that with wills. We keep them in our vault.”

“Oh, I know that, sir,” Baitsell answered proudly. “But you told me you didn't know the relatives. I thought if the old gentleman died and you didn't hear about it at once, they might rush in with another will. Now they'll find ours sitting up there in the courthouse, staring them right in the face. Yes, sir, Mr. Tower, you'll have to be given notice of every will that's offered. Public notice!”

Rutherford looked at the triumphant young man for a moment and then returned without a word to his own office. There he leaned against Uncle Reginald's safe and thought in a stunned, stupid way of old Cy Lambert laughing, even shouting, at Clitus Tilney. Then he shook his head. It was too much—too much to take in. He wondered, in a sudden new mood of detachment, if it wasn't rather distinguished to be hounded so personally by the furies. Orestes. Orestes Rutherford Tower. His telephone rang.

“Rutherford? Is it you?” a voice asked.

“Yes, Aunt Mildred,” he said quiedy.

“Well, I'm glad to get you at last. I don't know what your uncle would have said about the hours young lawyers keep today. And people talk about the pressure of modern life! Talk is all it is. But look, Rutherford. That blackguard of a landlord of mine is acting up again. He now claims that my apartment lease doesn't include an extra maid's room in the basement. I want you to come right up and talk to him. This afternoon. You can, can't you?”

“Yes, Aunt Mildred,” he said again. “I'm practically on my way.”

 

 

 

 

1962

H
ARRY REILLEY
occupied a peculiar status among the associates of Tower, Tilney & Webb. He had not been netted by the hiring committee in its annual Christmas canvas of the editors of the Harvard, Yale and Columbia law reviews. He was thirty-two and clerking for a small firm of real estate lawyers in Brooklyn when Clitus Tilney had decided to bolster Tower, Tilney's small department in that field by hiring a young man, already trained, from the outside. Harry understood that he was being employed as a specialist with little chance of ultimate partnership, and he had not minded until he had discovered the tight little social hierarchy into which the firm was organized. Then he decided that working in his status was like climbing the stairs in a department store while alongside one an escalator carried the other customers smoothly and rapidly to the landing.

The real estate department of Tower, Tilney had for years been run by an old associate, Llewellyn Buck, a dry, scholarly gentleman who spent most of his time studying Plantaganet law reporters through thick glasses and who was referred to about the office, with a mild and affectionate contempt, as one who had made nothing of a brilliant start.

“Real property, my dear Reilley, was the golden field of the common law,” he had told Harry at the beginning. “Everything else grew out of it. That's why everything else is warped, and only the law of conveyances is pure. Stay with purity, my boy. Also, it's a wonderful field in which to study your fellow mortals. There's something about a deed or a lease that brings out the meanest and the pettiest in them. I've seen a man lose a ten-million-dollar corner property over a difference of opinion about the reading of an oil meter!”