The Young Apollo and Other Stories (26 page)

"But it overcompensates, Dad. And not all your clients' wrongs are really wrongs."

"Then it's up to the bar to strengthen the opposition! It should be the best against the best, my boy. That's how the best is accomplished—at least in America."

"But in the meanwhile, those who are not the best get trampled on."

"They are not my affair, Philip."

"But they may be mine. Which is why I'm going where I'm going."

At last I gave in to my temper, even knowing it was a mistake. "Supplementing your miserable salary with the money that I've settled on you, earned, of course, by my trampling on the weak."

"Money is just money, Dad. It's only the use it's put to that counts. You've told me that often enough. You gave me that money to spend as I chose. If you want, I'll give it back."

Quickly now, I beat a retreat. "No, no, no, dear boy. It's yours to keep, and there'll be more, no matter where you practice law. But it's not, you know, that I haven't contributed substantially to Legal Aid myself. Why, I think they even gave me a plaque. It must be somewhere around here."

"I know that, Dad. But you never offered them legal services, either your own or those of any lawyer in the firm."

"Damn right I didn't! They were welcome to my money but not to my genius. That I keep for the real tests. And honestly, Phil, I think you might show a little more appreciation of a father who has always cared for you and provided you with everything you could want or need."

"Dad, you know that I appreciate all that! But now I'm treating you as a man who's entitled to the truth from his son. And nothing but the truth. Isn't that how you treated your own father?"

"What do you know about how I treated my father?"

"All that Granny once told me. You saw him dooming you to live in what you considered a wasteland, and you broke away."

"Are you implying that my firm is a wasteland?"

"Of course not, Dad."

I should have known better than to go to my wife for comfort. Irina had a bleak Russian way of assuming that facts couldn't hurt.

"I suppose he meant that your firm was a kind of moral wasteland," she commented mildly, as if she were describing a variety of soup.

"Irina! Surely you don't think anything like that of my firm, do you?"

"Oh, no, dear. But Philip is so strict, so moral. My aunt Olga was the same way. And the poor dear czarina was like that. Maybe she got it from her grandmother, Queen Victoria."

"And look what happened to her," I muttered.

Philip and his stepmother had formed a kind of alliance, not in any way against me but not including me. She liked his utter honesty as she liked mine, but I call it a "kind" of alliance because Irina had left too much of her heart in czarist Russia to view her American chapter as much more than a restful and not too disagreeable finale. She was beautiful, serene, charmingly kind, and vaguely sympathetic, but always detached. She had lost her husband and son in the war with Germany and had escaped the Reds by fleeing her vast Ukrainian estates on a British freighter across the Black Sea. She had joined some fellow White Russians, all penniless, in New York, where she had found work as a French teacher in a fashionable girls' school.

I had met her at a dinner party given by one of the school's trustees. The latter might not have invited a lowly instructress, but New York society was well aware that Princess Irina Sobieski had been the landlady of a hundred thousand former serfs and an intimate of the imperial family. Society was also aware that she reached a constant hand toward their pockets for indigent kin, but after all, one could always say no. I didn't, which was one of the reasons, perhaps even the principal one, that she married me. But I was shrewd enough to know that she was exactly what I needed, and so it proved.

I had no need of a housekeeper; I already had a most efficient one, whom my indolent Irina was glad enough to retain. I didn't need a mother for Philip, who was already in boarding school when Irina and I were married. Nor had I ever really loved a woman since Clara; socially I had moved easily in many circles as a contented widower under no compulsion to alter his status. But the idea of having a beautiful and aristocratic lady to preside over my establishments without unduly interfering with my settled ways had intrigued me. And Irina gave me just what I wanted.

She was at all times the perfect lady. She never had the crudity to articulate a definition of our relationship, which we both understood to be a classic case of symbiosis. She viewed the passing scene of my law practice, my partners, my court victories, as she might have viewed a mildly diverting comedy, and she acted with a charming grace on the rare occasions when I had some real need of her social skills. She was properly grateful for my generosity to her relatives and never overdid her demands. And I think she liked me well enough, when she thought of me, though I never shared the importance to her of the shades of her first husband and son. But then, did she ever share the importance to me of the shade of Clara? I was fair about it. We both were. It was our bond.

I offer this example of both her essential indifference to the New York scene and her ability on occasion to take advantage of it. She was nobody's fool. When I asked her once what she thought of one of my most brilliant younger partners, who, dining with us, had obviously been intrigued by his lovely hostess, she replied, "He reminds me of a very good coffee blender. It makes excellent coffee. But only coffee. Your partner makes very good law, I have no doubt. But that's all he makes."

Did she think that of me? At any rate, she never said so. And she had an eye on my young partner, for she later succeeded in marrying him to one of her indigent nieces. And it was a happy marriage, too.

With Philip, however, she showed something like a real warmth. Perhaps he reminded her of her slain son, one of the lost army of noble youths who, in her fantasy, might have saved Russia from the Red tide. Philip listened sympathetically to her tales of former glory, and she liked him to tell her about some of the more pathetic of his Legal Aid cases. Neither of them spoke of such matters to me, perhaps in the fear of boring me, yet I experienced something like jealousy over it.

"I don't quite see what you and Irina have so much in common," I couldn't help observing to my son one day. He had his own apartment, but he had made it a habit to come to Sunday lunch at my house. "I should have thought your political views were about as far apart as views can be."

"Irina doesn't really have political views, Dad."

"What about all those serfs? What about sending liberals to the Siberian mines? That's where the Sobieskis would have sent you, my lad."

"That was another world. It doesn't exist for her now."

"I sometimes wonder how much ours does."

Philip was silent, as he often was now when he felt we were approaching a gulf. Had he given me up?

The Great Depression did not catch me unprepared; I had liquidated many of my stocks while the market was high, and litigation survives every disaster. But the huge numbers of unemployed revived some of Irina's nightmares of the Russian Revolution, and she actually showed some slight interest in our situation.

"Have you monies, Langdon, invested outside this country?"

"Very insignificantly. Why do you ask?"

"Because it has come to seem strange to me that none of my family had the foresight to set up a bank account in London or Paris. I suppose they had too blind a faith in the stability of the czar. So when the storm hit us and we lucky ones got out—if we
were
the lucky ones—it was only with a few jewels sewn in our coats. My brother would still be driving a taxicab if you, my dear, hadn't come to our rescue."

"And you think I'd better look to my laurels now? With a bank account abroad? Where?"

"Well, isn't Argentina pretty sound? Helena Adamowski seems to think so."

I had to chuckle at this further evidence that, despite a lifetime of experiencing the disastrous folly of her clan, she would still take the word of a crazy old Slavic dowager over that of her brilliant spouse.

"So you see the guillotine being erected in Times Square for the likes of us?"

"Well, I suppose it would be better than being thrown down a mineshaft like the poor dear Grand Duchess Elizabeth. I'm not thinking only of myself, Langdon. I've been through all that. I'm thinking of
you.
"

"And I appreciate it, my dear. But if there should be a revolution, I doubt they'd want our lives. Our money should satisfy them. Though it won't do them much good after it's been spread around, as your former countrymen have already discovered. And you and I can go down to Virginia and hole up in what's left of the family mansion. Actually, it's not in too bad shape. I've kept it up. As a matter of fact we might both rather like it. In my end is my beginning."

"Oh, Langdon, do you think we really could do that?" Irina's voice took on a note of enthusiasm that was new to me. "It might be like the Ukraine! Why don't we go now? Do we have to wait for a revolution?"

I had a sudden picture of Irina in the wide field behind the back of the old house, gazing at the distant blue hills. She would belong there!

Well, we didn't have a revolution. We had the New Deal instead. And in lieu of losing my money, I made a pot of gold out of it. I became in the early nineteen thirties one of the principal proponents, in the federal courts, especially the supreme, of the unconstitutionality of FDR's social legislation. I saw myself as the champion of the individual against the government. Of course, my opponents maintained that I was the champion of the giant corporation against the government, which brought our conflict into sharp focus, for indeed I tended, and still tend, to identify the corporation with the individual. What is it, legally and even morally, but a person? And why should it not be entitled to the same rights and privileges? The child has grown into a man and should not be forever subject to a hovering nurse.

In this respect I should mention an experience that happened in the year 1907 which very much accentuated my early faith in the individual citizen as opposed to his democratically elected representative. It was the year of the panic, and one of my clients, a banker, took me with him to the library of the great J. P. Morgan, where we waited patiently, even reverently, for our turn to pass into the vast, high-ceilinged office hung with Renaissance masterpieces and gleaming with silver and gold, and submit our proposal of how to deal with the financial crisis. Never can I forget the sight of the silent tycoon, with his great glaring eyes and misshapen nose, bending over the game of solitaire that, listening without comment to my client's proposition. He did not cease to play, simply dismissing us with a grunt when we had finished. He did not adopt my client's plan, but he did adopt another one suggested on that same day, and chaos was averted. President Teddy Roosevelt complained that Morgan treated him as an equal. TR was wrong! Morgan, quite correctly, treated him as his inferior.

By the nineteen thirties, however, the pendulum had swung in the other direction. The great Teddy's distant cousin was now distinctly in the driver's seat. But for a time, a blessed time, five of the nine justices on our highest court shared my constitutional philosophy, and in some exhilarating battles with Uncle Sam's menials we threw out socialist law after socialist law. These were the great days of my legal career. I was fighting for the rights of free men to make their own contracts, fix their own wages and hours of labor in their own businesses, to hire non-union workers if they chose—in short, to manage their own affairs. I believed that the men who had made America a world power could be counted on to keep it one, as opposed to ward politicians with their dirty hands in the public trough. I wanted to be the white knight who kept the commerce clause from becoming a despot's tool and due process from turning into the noose that would strangle the liberty of the individual.

There were plenty of big men behind me, too, men who saw in my struggle a modern crusade. Some of them helped to swell my already impressive list of corporate clients, for they would be so inflamed by my briefs that they would feel it was almost unpatriotic to limit their retainer of my firm to constitutional problems.

Well, of course, it all ended when FDR was at last able to stack his court. It had never occurred to me that he would have a third term, let alone a fourth. I had even had reason to suppose that Wendell Willkie, if elected, might appoint me to the supreme bench. I am sure that my son, Philip, though he never says so, attributes what he calls my bitterness against the New Deal to my disappointment over this. And I suppose there might be some truth in his supposition, though I think my animosity to the sweeping socialization of the times would have survived any appointment.

Philip and I had worked out a kind of modus vivendi that worked moderately well, even after he accepted a job in the Justice Department and actually argued a case against me. He married a dear girl, and I was unable to resist her efforts to keep the peace between her husband and me. She prevailed in her insistence that politics not be discussed at family meetings. Irina, who detested political discussion in any case, helped in this.

And so time slid by, as did the Second World War, in which Philip, thank God, was too old and his children too young to engage. And finally it could be said of myself, as Anatole France said of his protagonist in
The Procurator of Judea,
"It was in the midst of such works and in meditating the principles of Epicurus that, with a faint surprise and a mild chagrin, he met the advent of old age."

But at eighty I was still in active charge of my firm. I had become a legend in downtown Manhattan. Philip had left the government to become a partner in a well-known Washington firm specializing in civil liberties. He was kind and dutiful as ever and came up regularly to see me, but I always felt that he regarded me as the respected relic of a past that had been largely and happily superseded. I might have been a Holbein portrait of Thomas Cromwell in a gallery of modern art.