Powers of Attorney (12 page)

“What's that you're drinking, Lois?” she asked.

“Vodka, dearie. And it's just the thing for you. Let me put a swig in your ginger ale.”

Mrs. Abercrombie allowed her to give her a swig and, after she had finished it, she allowed her to go to the bar to get her an even stiffer one. Perhaps it was indiscreet, but on the whole she thought not. She felt better already, and quite a bit better when she was halfway through her second. The depression inside remained, but it was lighter. In fact, it was not altogether disagreeable. She felt less irritated as she thought of the shabby present, more resigned, more philosophical. She even felt a swelling in her heart of something like affection for the good old firm that had planned to honor her that day.

“I'll bet that's better now, isn't it?”

“Yes, Lois, I think it is. I honestly think I can say it is.”

“That's one thing we owe the Russians, anyway.”

Mr. Tilney now raised a long arm over his head, and silence followed a ripple of warning buzzes to the corners of the room.

“Ladies and gentlemen of Tower, Tilney & Webb, if you please, if you please!” he exclaimed, and when the room was still he continued, in the leisurely, stately manner of one who knows that interruption is impossible and applause to be assumed: “It is once again my happy privilege to wish you all the greetings of the season.”

As he went on, smiling in the direction of each person to be honored with an individual greeting, Mrs. Abercrombie lost track of his words. She had fallen into a listless reverie, with a sense of being surrounded by snow, infinite snow, great silent soft banks of snow on the ground and more snow still descending, relentlessly, in slanted lines. It was the vodka, she vaguely supposed, and the vision which it had evoked of old Russia and now of temples with strange cupolas and men in fur hats in sleighs and grand duchesses in court dress with tiaras as they appeared in the illustrations of court memoirs at her lending library. But it was all suddenly blotted out by a present of marching feet, millions of marching feet, and rude laughs and horrid rough men and the ghastly vision of the poor czarina and her lovely daughters slaughtered in that cellar. And it seemed to Mrs. Abercrombie as she gazed about the room that the green file cabinets poking their sharp corners out from under the absurd incongruity of the hastily assembled, jerry-built pile of Christmas decorations were like the guns and rockets of Soviet military might poking their barrels and noses out from under angels' robes and doves of peace in a cartoon that mocked the sincerity of Russia's aversion to war. She was shocked by the sudden rude poke that Mrs. Grimshawe gave her.

“Annabel,” the latter whispered fiercely, “he's talking about you.”

And so he was.

“Mrs. A was my first impression of Tower & Strong, as the firm was then somewhat formidably named,” he was saying, and his cold, friendly eyes were turned on Mrs. Abercrombie with a twinkle. “I had come down to New York, fresh out of law school, and was trembling at the prospect of my interview with Judge Tower. Mrs. A came out to meet me in the lobby, took in my situation in a moment and smiled a merciful smile. ‘Just remember,' she warned me gently about her boss, ‘we hate F.D.R., we hate the NRA; we think McKinley was the last great American, and we lunch promptly at twelve-fifteen.'”

The roar of laughter that followed this startled Mrs. Abercrombie, and she gazed about, frightened, at the suddenly raucous throng. And then everything went very fast, and Mr. Tilney was praising her for four decades of devotion and people were clapping as loudly as if their hands were wooden slats, and Mr. Tilney was facing her, holding up a small golden eagle that seemed to be a paperweight, and then she was on her feet and there was a sudden silence, thunderous in its expectancy.

“Forty years,” she began in the high, clear meditative tone that she had rehearsed so many nights at home. Then she cocked her head as if the words were a piece of statuary that she was contemplating from a different angle. “Forty years,” she repeated musingly. “To many of you, to most of you perhaps, it is a lifetime. At least it encompasses
your
lifetime. To all of us it embraces what we think of as modern times. For the world, our world, was born with the end of the first war.”

As she paused she heard distinctly, from somewhere behind her, a high, plopping sound like a pebble falling into a still pond: a hiccup. There was a sudden startled ripple of laughter from the younger girls, followed by a tense hush.

“But there was a world before our modern world,” Mrs. Abercrombie continued, raising her chin to counter the vulgarity and insolence of that interruption. “The thing that most consoles me for growing older is that I was born early enough to have had a peek at that world. It was a quieter, slower, more gracious world ...”

Hie! Once again the impertinent little sound supplied her with an unsought semicolon. This time the laughter spread to the associates, but Mrs. Abercrombie heard Mr. Tilney's angry “Hush!” Silence was restored except for one girl who, with a hand to her lips to hold in evident hysteria, hurried from the room. As Mrs. Abercrombie resumed her speech she became aware, from the intent eyes and clenched fists of one young man before her, that he was making the same violent effort to repress his laughter.

“A more gracious world,” she reaffirmed in a louder, clearer tone. “A world where the telephone was reserved for important communications. Where a letter had to be thought about because it had to say something. Where there were no coffee breaks, no lady smokers, no machines for selling Coca-Cola ...”

Hic!

And now came pandemonium. The room seemed fairly to explode into one orgiastic roar of laughter. The repressive forces which had been used to maintain the silence hitherto had only swollen the ultimate furor. Juniors, abandoning themselves now to the general mood, heedless of the consequences, and then, almost immediately, jubilantly relieved to see their seniors in the same fix, threw back their heads, clapped their hands and howled. One of the office boys actually rolled on the floor. Mr. Webb, holding his hands over his big stomach, afraid perhaps of tiring his heart, made appalling, gasping sounds. But worst of all was Rutherford Tower. He behaved like a creature demented, hugging himself with his arms and swinging his torso to and fro as he screamed in a high pitched voice: “Oh! Oh!
Oh!”

Only Mr. Tilney did not laugh or even smile. He continued to gaze at Mrs. Abercrombie with eyes of gentle and inquiring sympathy as if there was no commotion, as if the speaker had simply paused to turn a page of notes, or to take a sip of water, and would resume in a moment. And then Mrs. Abercrombie, gazing back at him, felt a sudden weight in her knees and shoulders, felt the desk behind her as she sagged against it, and knew at last that it was she herself who had hiccuped.

 

She hesitated only a moment the next morning before pushing open the glass door to the reception room. Yet in that moment she raised her chin and squared her shoulders in the manner of a French noblewoman ascending the steps to the scaffold. The receptionist lowered her eyes and barely whispered her morning greeting; the two office boys, waiting for messages, nudged each other; an associate hurrying by in the corridor hurried a bit faster. It was some consolation, Mrs. Abercrombie reflected grimly, that they were all more embarrassed than she. She walked directly to Mr. Tilney's office and paused before the busily typing Miss Clinger.

“May I see him, please?”

Miss Clinger looked up with false surprise. “Oh, good morning, Mrs. A. Yes, go right in, why don't you? He's on the phone now, but he shouldn't be long.”

Mrs. Abercrombie's eyes softened as she stood before the desk of her telephoning employer. He was listening at the moment, but he raised a hand and smiled broadly in a friendly greeting that made them intimate. Painless to her already was the memory of last night's taxi ride to Brooklyn, when he had taken her to her very door, protesting all the while against the “barbarous” custom of office parties, assuring her that everyone knew that hiccups were caused more by ginger ale than by liquor, apologizing for the rudeness of the younger people and associating himself with her as members of a dwindling minority who still realized that without form, substance was merely clay. He had even warned her, at her door, to tell her husband nothing about the matter and to come to the office the next morning and “face down” the whole sorry crew. And she had done it. He would see that she was not unworthy of his trust and of his generosity.

“Mr. Tilney,” she said when he had put down the instrument, “I just stopped in to tell you one thing, and then I'll be off, for I know what a busy man you are. Here it is. I thought when the Surrogate died that the last of our really great gentlemen had gone. I now know I was wrong.”

He did not let her down. He did not spoil their moment by words. He sensed that her compliment was one that could only lose by acknowledgment. He simply sat and smiled at her, nodding his head gently, until she turned away to hide her tears and hurry from the room.

She passed Mr. Tower's room and noted that he was peeking at her from behind his
Law Journal.
With stiffly averted head she continued to her own desk where she found her telephone ringing. It was Mrs. Grimshawe.

“Oh, dearie, you
did
come in. I'm so glad.”

“Of course I'm in, Lois. What do you want?”

“Mr. Tower called ten minutes ago to say he didn't think you'd be in, and could he have a girl from the pool?”

“Tell Mr. Tower,” Mrs. Abercrombie answered gratingly, “that that will not be necessary.
I
will take care of his work. As usual.”

Hanging up, she reached for Tower's unopened mail and dumped it in her “Hold” basket. She then opened the Foundation account book and started making slow, careful entries of elaborately rounded figures. At half past ten his head at last appeared in her doorway.

“Could we do some dictation now, please, Mrs. Abercrombie?”

She looked up and gazed at him in bland astonishment. “Why, I think so, Mr. Tower,” she replied cheerfully. “Just as soon as I've finished with the account books. Mr. Tilney told me last night that he wanted everything up to date by the end of the year.”

The long head and the sallow face disappeared, and Mrs. Abercrombie reflected, with a deep sigh of satisfaction, that she still had a whole half year to make him pay for those cries of the night before.

H
ARRY
R
EILLEY
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 had 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!”

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, greyish-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?”