The Collected Stories of Louis Auchincloss (12 page)

Harry cared little for legal philosophy and less for the opportunity to observe his clients at their less becoming moments, but he liked the salary and stuck to the job. He was used to the small print of deeds and mortgages and was not bothered by detail; his mind, like his body, was tough. He was a big man with big shoulders, and he walked in a stiff, blocky fashion that was yet consistent with a fine muscular coordination. He had a large round head and a bull neck, thick blond hair that he wore in a crew cut and small, grayish-blue eyes with a habitual expression of reserve that bordered on suspicion. His nose was straight and wide, his jaw square, and the slanting lines of his unexpectedly delicate upper lip were almost parallel to his cheekbones. Harry was handsome with the handsomeness of a hundred-and-ninety-pound Irishman in the prime of life, but the danger of overweight already hung about him.

He would have got on well enough with the other clerks had he been less sensitive about real or imagined condescension. When Bart French, Tilney's son-in-law, the rich young man who worked harder than all the others simply because he was rich, paraded down the corridor to go out to lunch, followed by the little group with which he was working on a corporate indenture, and paused at the door of Harry's office to ask cheerily: “Care to join us—” Harry would wonder if he was not performing an act of charity to the poor slave in real estate. But he would join them and listen, bored, while they discussed in tedious detail the problems of their current indenture until Bart, towards the end of the meal, would turn to him with a perfunctory show of interest and ask in that same maddening, cheery tone: “What's new in the metes and bounds department? Have you caught any covenants running with the land?”

Harry had been a prickly soul since the age of fourteen when his father, a seemingly successful Brooklyn building contractor, had gone to jail for looting his company. Harry, the youngest of seven, had been the one to feel it most keenly and, in the ensuing years of retrenchment and hardship, had been his mother's primary consolation. After his father had been released, and when he had taken to whiskey and selfpity, Harry had been passionately and articulately bitter in his resentment of him. But fathers like Angus Reilley always win in the end, and his death of cancer in Harry's freshman year at Fordham had so crushed the latter with remorse that he had seemed doomed for a time to the paternal alcoholic course. Indeed, his older brothers and sisters, including Joseph, the priest, had gloomily prognosticated that Harry would go to the dogs, but Harry seemed to have a stabilizer built into his character which, when he tipped too close to the fatal angle, suddenly, if with a great deal of churning and throbbing, succeeded in righting the lurching vessel. He had finished Fordham and Fordham law in the first third of his classes; he had fought as a marine in Korea and been decorated, and he had supported himself creditably in the law ever since. It was a disappointment to his mother that he preferred a room in Manhattan to the family home and a dissolute bachelor existence to the safer joys of early matrimony, but when he came to the Reilleys' Sunday lunch he always looked hearty and well, and he was charming with all the little nephews and nieces. The family had to concede that when Harry wanted to put his best foot forward, he had a very good foot to offer.

In Tower, Tilney, however, this foot was seen more by the staff than by the lawyers. Harry blandly ignored the elaborate etiquette laid down by the late Judge Tower. He called the stenographers by their first names and went out to lunch with the men in the accounting department. He maintained an easy, joking, mock-flirtatious relationship with the older women—Mrs. Grimshawe, as head of stenographic, Mrs. Lane, the librarian, and Miss Gibbon, the chief file clerk—as a result of which he got as good service as Clitus Tilney himself. In fact, Mrs. Grimshawe, “Lois” as he impudently called her, had been known to leave her desk on the little dais from which she supervised her department, grab a pencil and pad from one of her girls and go to Mr. Reilley's office to take dictation herself!

Among the law clerks his only two friends were the two whom he considered, like himself, to be mavericks: Lee Ozite, the managing clerk, who handled the court calendars and arranged for the service of papers, and Doris Marsh, the single woman lawyer in the office. Doris's interest in Harry was immediate and lively, aroused by nothing greater than his merely civil appreciation of herself as a woman. To the other clerks she might as well have been neuter, a tall, pale, tense, awkwardly moving figure of near thirty in a plain brown suit, distastefully associated with taxes, whose black hair was lightly flaked with a premature gray. But Harry did not, like many working men, relegate sex to nonworking hours. A woman to him was always a woman, and, without finding Doris particularly his type, he could perfectly see that her skin, if chalky, was nonetheless smooth and soft, her breasts full and fine and that, without the glasses and the nervous smile, her face might reveal the firm, rounded lines of a Greek statue. Harry could picture Doris sitting on a rock naked, looking out to sea, her hair blown in the wind, and he deplored the fate which had confined her to a city desk.

The first time they lunched together, he discovered that she was a great talker. She drank a martini before her meal and a glass of ale with it and complained at length of the difficulties of being a woman lawyer in Tower, Tilney. She gave instances of discrimination in the tax department: of how she was paid less than associates who had come in after her and not asked to the office outings at the Glenville Beach Club. What just saved her from being a bore was the dry accuracy of her observation and her evident sense of the foolishness of the whole show.

“Now, don't ask me why I don't get another job,” she concluded, taking off her glasses and gazing at him with a stare of bland seriousness. “It would be very ungentlemanly because I wouldn't have a thing to say. Let's put it that I have a persecution complex.”

“I thought perhaps you hoped to marry one of the partners.”

“Which?”

“Why not Madison? He's single, isn't he?”

“That he is.” She maintained all her air of gravity. “He might be just mean enough to do it to save the pittance he now pays me.”

“And think of the income tax deduction you'd bring him! For a man in his bracket that might even make up for a wife who reads herself to sleep with the Revenue Code.”

Doris startled him by throwing back her head and uttering a long, rather wild laugh. But she cut it off with equal abruptness. “I
crave
you, Harry Reilley. You're human. One of the few people in the whole damn shop who is. Do you realize you're the first of the associates who's ever asked me to lunch? The very
first?”
She paused to reflect. “Except Ozey, and they treat him, poor man, like the janitor.”

For the rest of lunch they took apart, one by one, the partners of the firm. Doris, of course, had more to say, because she knew them better. At first she showed some slight degree of reticence, but she rapidly lost it as she drank her ale, and by dessert she was speculating freely that Waldron Webb was a sublimated homosexual and that Morris Madison had a neurotic fear of women. It was the most obvious kind of female revenge against a male community: she simply denied that they were men.

“It must be a sorry prospect for a single woman,” Harry observed as they walked back to the office. “You should have gone into advertising.”

“But things have looked up since they started hiring big Irishmen. I may stick around a bit.”

They both laughed and went back to work as easily as if there had been nothing between them but a common employer. Yet Harry was faintly ashamed of his little game of coaxing the woman out from behind the tax computer. It took so little to do it. Doris developed the habit of dropping into his office once a day to smoke a cigarette and “reset her sights,” as she put it. She pretended that it was essential, after a certain number of hours of work at Tower, Tilney, to become “rehumanized.” Together they laughed at things and people, and he found her office gossip amusing, but basically the world in which he lived began outside the doors of the office while hers ended on the same threshold. The little bites of the legal hierarchy raised small red welts in his sensitivity which he could afford to ignore, or at the most irritably scratch, but in her they seemed to secrete a subtle poison which by dint of the constant application of antitoxins had become a necessity to her nature.

He had had too much to do with women not to be aware that the least advance on his part would be immediately and gratefully misinterpreted, and he was determined that no such advance would be made. She had asked him to two cocktail parties at the apartment which she shared in Greenwich Village with another woman lawyer, and he had declined both. Doris had chosen to accept his lame excuses literally and had had the sense not to betray any disappointment that she might have felt. But when the approach was made by a third person, Harry's plan of action, or inaction, was upset, and so he came to be committed to a weekend with Doris in a cottage in Devon, a small sandy summer settlement on the south shore of Long Island.

It was Lois Grimshawe's cottage, and the invitation came from her. Nobody knew better than Lois the incongruity, under Judge Tower's rules, of such a bid from even a senior staff member to a junior associate, and her sense of the indecorum was pasted all over her round, smiling, pink and yellow countenance when she came into Harry's office.

“You may think it very bold of me, but you have been so very friendly—not at all like the other associates—that I wondered—if you were going to be stuck in town over next weekend—whether you might not like . . .” She paused here, still smiling, and stuck a finger in the high pile of her dyed auburn hair. “Oh, no, but you wouldn't, of course.”

“Wouldn't what, Lois?”

“Wouldn't want to spend that weekend with me in my little place in Devon. Oh, it's just a shack, you know. We do all our own cooking and everything, but there's plenty of whiskey and nice neighbors and lots of sun and sea, and if I say so myself we do have fun.” Here Lois giggled.

“Of course I'll come. I'd love to.”

“Oh, goody!” Lois clapped her hands in excitement. “There'll be just you and me and Doris Marsh and Henry Barnes, an old friend of mine. He's a senior cashier at Standard Trust. Really a lovely person. And Marjorie Clinger—you know, Mr. Tilney's secretary—has the cottage next door, so you'll see some familiar faces!”

Harry sighed when she had gone and debated how best to get out of it, but this, he finally decided, was unworthy. It was insulting to attribute too much design to Doris and absurdly weak of himself to be afraid of being able to resist it, if design there was. He had taken care of himself on the beaches of Korea; he could certainly do so on those of Devon. The way to take life was as it came.

And, indeed, it seemed to come easily enough. The cabins of Lois Grimshawe and Miss Clinger, like dozens of others along the dunes of Devon, were small weatherbeaten shingle structures, like overgrown bathhouses, each with a back porch facing the sea on which drinks were constantly mixed. There was a great deal of laughing and joking on arrival, and much shouting back and forth between cabins and many hilarious references to last weekend's hangovers, but one could do, apparently, as one pleased, and Harry, after changing to a pair of red bathing trunks and sitting for a few minutes with the group on the beach, took off alone down the dunes at a pace that was no invitation to any woman to join him. He walked for miles, past larger cabins, past huge summer palaces, past swimming clubs, and every half-hour he would run down into the water and plunge in the hissing surf. It was glorious exercise, and he did not return until eight that night, when he found a noisy picnic of some twenty people going on in front of Lois's cabin. Lois had already drunk too much to be cross at his disappearance, and when he had changed to a shirt and blue jeans and joined the group, he felt better than he had felt all summer and in a mood to drink deeply.

Which he did. Much later in the evening, when the others were singing songs, he was sitting above the group on a ridge of dune with Doris Marsh. She looked very well in the moonlight and in the flicker of the fire below. Her hair blew in the wind, and her figure was well accentuated by her long velvet pants. Harry was reminded of his earlier vision of her naked by the sea. Yet Doris seemed absorbed in a melancholy and reflective mood. She, too, was interested in drinking.

“You know, Harry, on a night like this, under all those stars, it just doesn't seem possible that Monday will find me back in that sweatshop writing a memorandum on Miss Johanna Shepard's capital loss carryovers.”

“Why go back, then?”

Doris squinted at the moon. “Just a little matter of bread and butter.”

“Oh, can it, Doris. You could make more money for half the work. What about Uncle Sam? Ever think of the Collector's Office? As a matter of fact, I've been turning the idea over myself.”

“Oh, no, Harry, don't you dare!” Very solemn now, she turned to shake her head at him. “You're not like me, you know. You
could
make the grade.”

“What grade?”

“You could be a partner. No, dear boy, don't grunt and throw sand. I know exactly what I'm talking about. And I know all about the real estate department not being the best place to start. Sure, it's a dead end. But you don't have to stay in it. You could go to Mr. Tilney and ask for a transfer. And with your personality, you'd get it. Believe me, Harry!”

“Oh, bosh. They don't want my kind in their paneled offices. Give me that cup and let me get you a drink.”

“Here's that cup and by all means get me a drink, but I still know what I'm saying.” As he took her empty cup she turned away and hugged her knees, facing the soft breeze. “And I'm a fool to tell you, too.”